ClearLake-AnAr-Aff-37th-Annual-Stanford-Invitational-Round-2
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School
Lake Highland Preparatory School**We aren't endorsed by this school
Course
DEBATE 123456
Subject
Arts & Humanities
Date
Jan 14, 2025
Pages
15
Uploaded by DukeBoarMaster1195
Stanford rd 2 aff
AdvantageDiscurso desde el status quo pone a les estudiantes latinx en posiciones peligrosas – forzandolos a cumplir con estructuras normalizadas que arriesgan imperialismo cultural y cimientan nuestra posicion entre los mas bajos de la sociedadBoffa 1Adriana Boffa (is currently a PhD student and instructor in the Department of Secondary of Education at the University of Alberta. Her passions currently intercept various philosophies (e.g., those of Deleuze and Guattari) in order to explore what it might mean to engage with place and with difference differently. SCHIZOPHRENIZING THE LATINO/A SUBJECTIVITY DAH 9/9/18) Estos códigos, en forma de lenguaje racista o deshumanizante determinado y utilizado por el estado, como se mencionó en la sección anterior, proliferan en la corriente principal a través de diversas tecnologías de los medios. Lazzarato, en su artículo The Machine (2006b), utiliza una perspectiva deleuziana-guattariana sobre la "esclavitud maquínica" para discutir cómo uno puede ser "esclavizado o sometido" por la máquina específicamente en el nivel molar del individuo (su dimensión social, funciones , y representaciones) - a través del dispositivo de la televisión (párrafo 2). Sin embargo, afirma que hay muchos "dispositivos" para la esclavitud mecanisista que existen tanto a nivel molar como molecular.Lo que quiere afirmar es que “la función-sujeto en la comunicación y el lenguaje no esen modo alguno natural: al contrario, tiene que ser construida e impuesta... No hay sujeto, sólo arreglos colectivos de enunciación que producen enunciados ...de la realidad dominante" (Lazzarato, 2006b, párr. 5). Como se ve en los ejemplos anteriores, la narrativa dominante, el idioma"principal" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987), es uno de racismo y su lenguaje se perpetúa a través de los medios y tiene el potencial de repetirse a través de sus sujetos. Para Deleuze y Guattari (1980/1987) el lenguaje es político, ya que es la “transmisión de la palabra como orden-palabra” (p. 77) – como enunciados que están vinculados a una “obligación social” (p. 77). La palabra orden es una función del lenguaje en el sentido de que lleva consigo una "presuposición implícita" en una "relación de redundancia" que establece lo que uno "'debe' (sic) pensar, retener, esperar" (p. 79). Eugene Holland (2013) afirma además que "el efecto de las palabras de orden ni siquiera es una cuestión de creencia, mucho menos de verdad, sino de obediencia y conformidad, muchas de las cuales son inconscientes" (p. 78). Por ejemplo, las palabras "inmigrantes ilegales" e "ilegales" han proliferado en los mediosde comunicación y, como tales, han proliferado en el habla normal y son utilizadas con indiferencia por personas y organizaciones de noticias sin pensar en aquellos que se ven afectados por la esencia "deshumanizante". de ellos(Goodman, 2013). ¿Cuál es el propósito de conectar la palabra "ilegal" con inmigrante? Como se mencionó en la sección anterior, el lenguaje puede funcionar para crear cesuras y ser utilizado para justificar las acciones de un Estado o sistema hacia otro, por lo que funciona con un elemento de miedo e inestabilidad que incita y promueve el individualismo, la diferenciación y la competencia en lugar de la solidaridad. , colaboración y unidad (Lazzarato, 2009). Estas palabrastambién existen en el ámbito educativo y funcionan como una "técnica... para identificar, definir y clasificar el espacio escolar" con el fin de responsabilizar a los estudiantes, docentes y escuelas ante el modelo neoliberal al que sirve (Klaf, 2013). , pág. 297). Las etiquetas o
"palabras-orden" utilizadas, al igual que las del lenguaje utilizado para describir al inmigrante mexicano en la película, están imbuidas de presupuestos establecidos, percepciones y poder (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987). Continuando con la noción de que el poder está involucrado en todo lo que hacemos y en todo lo que, como ciudadanos, participamos; entonces podemos decir que estas consignas están incrustadas en todos los aspectos de la vida escolar y son parte de la rutina del aula llevada a cabo por el maestro a través de la entrega del currículo y los diversos textos tecnológicos y no tecnológicos que se utilizan.Debate es un espacio educativo que involucra multiples agentes interactuando – estas interaciones pueden solidificar o romper regimenes de subjetividadBoffa 2Adriana Boffa (is currently a PhD student and instructor in the Department of Secondary of Education at the University of Alberta. Her passions currently intercept various philosophies (e.g., those of Deleuze and Guattari) in order to explore what it might mean to engage with place and with difference differently. SCHIZOPHRENIZING THE LATINO/A SUBJECTIVITY DAH 9/9/18) Como educador, estoy particularmente interesado en cómo los estudiantes ylos maestros, a través de sus conexiones entre sí,con el currículum, con el salón de clases ycon las cosas en general, pueden navegar y crear nuevos potenciales para sus subjetividades en un entorno escolar y de salónde clases en tal forma. de manera que sus devenires no sean borrados por los de la estructura dominante. Esto es especialmente importante para la subjetividad inmigrante que con demasiada frecuencia se ve desafiada a 'elegir' una identidad sobre otra(borrar una identidad en lugar de otra/otra) para ser aceptada por sus pares y la sociedad. Toda mi vida aquí en Canadá como inmigrante chilena he tenido que lidiar con la representación y la noción de lo que uno es en relación con Otro;un problema que es conflictivo y limitante al mismo tiempo. Más bien, ¿cómo habría sido mi experiencia si lo que hice en relación con los demás importara tanto, si no más, que lo que yo era? ¿Cómo es ver a una persona como un todo (una totalidad de experiencias y eventos), como una multiplicidad? John Rajchman retoma esta noción deleuzeana de multiplicidad en su libro The Deleuze Connections (2000) al hablar de cómo pensar en nosotros mismos y en los demás como "compuestos de multiplicidades";por lo tanto, "alejarnos de entendernos a nosotros mismos en términos de identidad e identificacióno como personas o seres distintos... Significa que nunca nos dividimos por completo en especies, razas, incluso géneros 'puros', que nuestras vidas de hecho pueden nunca se reducirá a la 'individuación' de tal clase o tipo puro" (p. 81). En términos más simples, significa mirar más allá de la identidad de la persona y ver al sujeto por lo que puede hacer en ese momento de conexión dado el contexto y las circunstancias que se le han dado y que están trayendo consigo. Como educadora, experimenté de primera mano la importancia de conectarme con los estudiantes de manera sincera, que no solo me presentara como una 'maestra' o como una 'mujer' o como una 'chilena', sino que me conectara con mis alumnos de manera que sacara a relucir todo mi experiencias abarcadas en conexión con las suyas. Permitir que los estudiantes vean más allá de quién era yo en base a sus nociones presupuestas y permitirles conectarse conmigo como un todo, con todas las experiencias que conformaron quién era yo antes que ellos. Creo que esto permitió conexiones más profundas con mis alumnos, conexiones que abrirían un espacio para que sucediera otro aprendizaje que iría más allá del currículo 'dado'. Es en ese tipo de conexiones donde existe el potencial de convertirse para todos los involucrados.El genocidio cultural hace impossible la continuacion del discursoLear 06https://www.apadivisions.org, xx-xx-xxxx, "Radical Hope: Ethics in Face of Cultural Devastation (Book Review)," https://www.apadivisions.org/division-39/publications/reviews/radical-hopeEsta historia del sufrimiento del pueblo Crow (y otras personas de las Primeras Naciones) no es desconocida para muchos de nosotros. Sin embargo, Lear argumenta que el Cuervo sufrió un tipo particular de devastación, que se manifiesta en el comentario de Plenty Coups. Señala que cuando el gobierno de EE. UU. prohibió por la fuerza la guerra entre tribus, "contar golpes" perdió
sentido y, en consecuencia, no pudo haber rituales que celebraran las victorias de los cuervos. “El problema”, declara Lear, “es que los Cuervo han perdido los conceptos con los que podían construir una narrativa. Esta es una pérdida real, no solo una que se describe desde un cierto punto de vista. Es una verdadera pérdida de un punto de vista” (10). Refiriéndose a este punto, Lear indica que antes dela devastación cultural, las narraciones y los rituales de los cuervos reflejaban su "insistencia" frente a la vulnerabilidad rutinaria. Lear explica que las ideas y virtudes tradicionalesde Crow estaban integradas en susnarraciones y rituales, y derivaban significado de ellos porque los símbolos y rituales se estaban viviendo. La vida sucedió, la historia tuvo lugar precisamente porque las narrativas y los rituales de los cuervos proporcionaron significado, incluso en el caso de la derrota de los sioux. Sin embargo, la negación forzosade contar los golpes por parte del gobierno de los EE. UU., por ejemplo, hizo que sus formas tradicionales de expresar la “insistencia” fueran ininteligibles. Así, la frase, “después de esto no pasó nada”, significaba que no habría Danzas del Sol ni golpes de conteo porque “ya no es posible hacerlo” (p.37). Estos rituales, que ya no están enraizados en la vida vivida, carecen de sentido y sin sentido vivido nada sucede. El comentario de Plenty Coups da testimonio de “una pérdida que no es en sí misma un acontecimiento, sino la ruptura de aquello en términos de lo cual ocurren los acontecimientos” (p. 38). La historia se agota. En resumen, lo que sucede es significativo en virtud de nuestras historias y rituales y nada sucede cuando los Cuervos son privados de las acciones e historias que formaron su vida cotidiana y sus horizontes futuros. Esta vulnerabilidad frente a la devastación cultural, esta amenazareal delsinsentidode las narrativas y rituales tradicionales, y lainminencia de la muerte del sujetoCuervo parecería llevar a cualquiera a la desesperación suicida o a ingerir el opio de la indiferencia. Sin embargo, en este profundo abismo de oscuridad, Lear retrata la chispa de esperanza radical presente en la vida de Plenty Coups y su gente. Plenty Coups fue testigo de "la muerte del sujeto Cuervo" y lo hizo "para despejar el terreno para un renacimiento". Porque si no se reconoce la muerte, lo más probable es que haya todo tipo de formas vacías de seguir “como Cuervo”” (p. 51). El luto y la limpieza del terreno revelan la chispa radical de la esperanza, más que el estancamiento sentimental de la nostalgia o la seductora inutilidad de la venganza.
AdvocacyThus, the advocacy – Defendemos mímica radical como el método para que participantes puedan luchar contra el imperialismo de lenguaje en debateThis is not your typical larp aff: we defend radical mimicry – what larpers do as a method of unintelligibility to rupture debate’s nature of language
FramingLinguistic necropolitics manifests itself through debate’s attempts of normalism – the worst form of unfairness destroying accessibility DeShields 18, Inte'a, A. DeShields. Spitfire: Framing White Rage in Response to Black Rhetoric. Diss. University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 2018. // SJ DH recut CL AAA performance that is highly stylized and reflective of all the components a debater strives to present in competition— a well-organized, compelling set of arguments and evidence that work within the set of rules that govern what is most desirable in a competitive debater. Paroske (2011) suggests that for debaters, language acquisition of the debate style and languageis essential to be taken seriously by the debate community, of fellow debaters, coaches, and judges. He posits that language acquisition ensures that only those willing to adopt the new language system become experienced debaters (p. 191). He goes on to explain,that part of the nature of competitive debate is the restriction of what can or cannot be said within the linguistic rules of framing an argument. This process then, in the framework of EoP,may limits the extent to which observation of a participants’ identity as it relates to whom they are outside of the confines of the technical, jargon laden, physically restrictive, debate performance.The possible limitation of at least observing the poetics of performance, in observation and analysis of debate may be that “agency in a debater’s use of unmarked patterns is used to establish identification and mark identity as a skilled debater “while strategy for political and moral devices may call for the use of marked patterns.” A debater may be reluctant to utilize marked [linguistic] patterns for fear of judgment that may result in a loss and the subsequent mark of being identified as deviant to the linguistic norms of debate. Paroske, cites Bourdieu (1984 and 1986) and Dimock (2009) to explain the phenomenological function of language and social capital as it relates to the language of debate. To be successfulin debate by most standards entails “forcing all thoughts into the official language” (Paroske, 2011, p. 192) [thereby] restricting what can be said. To progress further in the ranks, language fluency is an almost nonnegotiable skill.The acquisition of and adroit use of debate language and stylistics means a debater uses the language of debate which, in its form as representative of pedagogical ideology, social capital, and politically loaded arguments, a debater strategically chooses which part of her or his pedagogically political linguistic identity will achieve a win. However, the choice of language will most always be presented in the form of standardized, unmarked English. This strategic act of using unmarked language, limiting a representation of a linguistic identity additional to that of a debater, is likely to be limited in this framework which may also limit the variability of the observable poetics of the performance given that debaters, aside from individual characteristics of voice, strategically utilize a set a rules of jargon that are most likely to garnera win. There was a time 81 when debate was seen as a game in which the best performance of high academic discourse wins. The idea of high academic discourse reiterates a political inclination toward a standard of whiteness that goes unmarked in the language of debate and thereby making any varied use of language not strategic to an argument or evidence potentially marked as deviant and low academic discourse. For Bauman, performance is meant to highlight an “artful use of language in the conduct of social life-in kinship, politics, economics, and religion-...” rendering performance “socially constitutive and efficacious, not secondary and derivative.” The stylistic expectations of ICFD [debate] may prove to be a limiting factor in the number of African American participants that use marked varieties of English in competition given that research by Rogers (1996) “reveals a majority of male debaters express the view that minorities are “deficient in the skills necessary for success within the open ranks due to some cultural ‘flaw’ linked to emotion, cognitive process and/or verbal ability” (Hill, 1998, p. 18). Those who choose to participate and progress through the ranks have in some way mastered the language stylistics and expectations of debate. Many African Americans will even change their communication styles in order to disprove [stereotype] expectations and be successful in forensics competition (Hill, 1998). In this view, the language of debate may prove limiting in its originality of speeches, which, in the case of policy debate, are often, part of a debate teams’ case arguments constructed for them and used throughout a year of competition and language conformity is celebrated and rewarded. For African American debaters the pressure to acquire and efficaciously employ the language of debate is high. Bauman acknowledges the politics present in the utilization of this frame and the issues in the act of such control and the social issues of power that may arise from its application. As an answer to the possible problems that may arise Bauman offers factors of consideration in moving along in the research process are; access, legitimacy, competence, and values. The interrelations of dimensions of analysis provide the following theory developed by Bucholtz and Hall as a boarding point for a more pragmatic performer-centered approach to data collection and analysis of the sociocultural interaction of language and identities of African American ICFD participants. Bucholtz and Hall (2003) view performance from the frame of Hymes and Bauman as well as, performativity from the frame of Austin and Butler (see above) as intelligible concepts in the development of their approach to the study of language and identity and language interaction. Performance in both senses involves stylization, the highlighting and exaggeration of 83 ideological associations (Bucholtz and Hall, 2003). They go on to explain, that [p]performance is therefore a way to bring identities to the fore, often in subversive or resistant ways (Bauman & Briggs, 1990, p. 381) 22 and look to Hymes (1975) Bauman (1978), Bauman and Briggs (1990), and Briggs (1998), who viewed performance as more than a “mere reiteration of an underlying textual structure that was traditionally taken to be primary” (p. 587) but demonstrated that performance is instead emergent in the course of its unfolding in specific encounters as a spring board for developing a framework that sees identity as an emergent phenomenon of social interaction and culture. African Americans, Intercollegiate Competitive Debate, and Language Students across the life span of education experience a system that celebrates standardized English while home varieties have historically faced a stream of efforts to “iron out,” “white-wash,” correct, fix, make proper, and de-culturalize the speech patterns of various linguistic cultural backgrounds. Black English and its speakers have experienced the pressures and stigmatization throughout the course of American history. Black English(es) have been the root of contentious debates in public forums; from the abolitionist
movement (Dick, 1973), throughout the Civil Rights and the 22 Pagliai and Farr (2000) 84 Black of Arts Movements, to the Ann Harbor School District Decision of 1979 and Oakland, California Ebonics resolution of 1997, to recent literature centered on race and language politics (Alim & Smitherman, 2012). No aspect of the Black American experience can be explored without consideration of language, culture and identity, and the subsequent intersections. Researchers have begun trying to discover what it is about the activity that turns women and minorities away? (Stepps & Gardner, 2001). The leading perspective stems from the belief of cultural/social bias represented in the demographics of participants, coaches, judges, and forensics and debate program directors. Research on the perspective of women, primarily white women, in pursuing and competing in debate is available at length; however, ethnic minorities, namely African Americans have not been an area of in depth consideration. Loge (1991) and Hill (1998) pursued penetrating the topic of African Americans in collegiate forensics and debate. Other studies have highlighted the numbers of African Americans in debate in lump with women who out number ethnic minorities considerably. These same studies focus on gender related issues in debate and effectively establish evidence of gender bias in language and rewarded delivery style. Loges (1990) recognized the disparity and began to record and quantify the 85 reasons why African American students participate in debate. In a survey of 64 schools “only 22 reported having black debaters on the team…a total of only 40 black debaters, of whom 22 were novice, 10 junior varsity and only 8 varsity.” Even more telling, “only nine schools reported that their black debaters won speaker awards and only two schools reported that their black debaters frequently reached the elimination rounds of large tournaments” (p. 80). Under-represented debaters must participate in a debate structure and culture formed by the dominant group of white coaches and debaters (Stepps & Gardner, 2001; Stepp, 1997; Loge, 1990). They must also participate and meet the linguistic stylistic satisfaction of judges that reflect the latter population. It is here, in the realm of coaching, competing, and being judged, both in and outside of the activity, that therelies a point of contention that raised the sands of discord in reaction to Black rhetoric by whitemedia. Competitors in ICFD enter the activity fully aware of the language component but minority students quickly find themselves to be few in numbers. This activity allows for a competitive edge that restsin large part, on the effective use of standardized American English or the status quo of American speech. The status quo, however, represents a recycling of ideologies that reflect high value on the skillful use of standardized American English that is steeped in race and class bias.In consideration of the bias that rests as the foundation of standardized American English it is necessary to investigate the inextricably linked role of language identity and subsequent language attitudes as it relates to these students’ experiences in competing with a language that may not be culturally their ownThus, the role of the ballot is to vote for the debater that best performatively and methodologically ruptures linguistic oppression in debate. Native language is a form of self-representation, used in the privilege of this debate and can be used by the reader as incorporating themselves as part of the cultural struggle Motyl & Arghavan 18, Katharina Motyl & Mahmoud Arghavan (2018) Writing against neocolonial necropolitics: literary responses by Iraqi/Arab writers to the US ‘War on Terror’, European Journal of English Studies, 22:2, 128-141, DOI: 10.1080/13825577.2018.1478256 //SJ DH recut CL AAWriting as performing survival of neocolonial necropolitics As will have become apparent, the texts under considerationin this essayhavea poetological component or reflect on the role of art in the face of large-scale death, human sufferingand 138 K. MOTYL AND M. ARGHAVAN cultural annihilation. The ‘torn text’ abu ghraib arias constitutes the result of Metres’ grappling with the difficulty of imagining and representing the unmaking to which the US empire subjected Iraqis by using torture. Mikhail’s poem contemplates whether writing literature makes a difference in contexts where death is ubiquitous and literature is deliberately targeted. While some Iraqi contributions to Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here highlight the importance of reading and exchanging ideas on Baghdad’s ‘Street of the Booksellers’ for the city’s population during the trials of the last decades, Antoon’s novel exposes the impossibility of producing art in the face of necropolitics, a condition which is inimical to the creative process. The two questions these writers grapple with – Does art have any meaning in the face of war, colonial annihilation and other manifestations of human malice? And if so, how are said atrocities to be represented? – evoke the artist’s perennial dilemma captured in Theodor Adorno’s justly famous statement ‘Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ (1977: 30, our translation). This statement has been widely interpreted as an injunction against writing poetry. However, Elaine Martin suggests that Adorno’s statement is best understood as an aporia: Defined as an irresolvable impasse as a result of equally plausible yet inconsistent premises the term ‘aporia’ succinctly captures the essence of Adorno’s deliberations on post-Shoah art: the imperative to represent the egregious crimes and the impossibility of doing so. (Martin, 2006: 2) What Adorno seems to have postulated, then, is that writerly engagement with crimes against humanity should not fall back on an aesthetics of Light Romanticism. In this way, he implicitly critiqued a traditional Kunstverständnis which conceptualises art’s primary function as enabling the recipient’s experience of beauty (see Adorno, 1984). In (neo)colonial contexts, a third dimension is added to the conundrum ‘native’ writers face. Since literature serves as a repository of a ‘native’ society’s knowledge about its own history and epistemology, it becomesa crucial form ofcultural self-representation, one that also functions as an antidote tothe distortions produced by colonialist Othering of ‘native’ cultures. Thus, the imperative tocontinue their society’s cultural self-representationby writing may outweigh the selfdoubts ‘native’ writers may have regarding the impossibility of representing the atrocities visited upon their society.After all, if Iraqis were able to associate the bomb attack on al-Mutanabbi Street with the Tigris having turned red, then black after the Mongol invasion of Baghdad, this was not only due to the fact that this event had become engrained in Iraqi cultural memory, but also to the fact that contemporary writers had preserved it for the generations to come. Thus, Iraqi writers’ very act of writing post-2003 constitutes a performative survival of the US empire’s necropolitical assault on Iraqi biological and social life. In this context, Iraqi diaspora writerssuch as Sinan Antoon and Dunya Mikhail alsoused their relative privilegeof not living under existential threat to reflect on the devastation of both their compatriots and their homeland’s cultural heritage, thereby making their own contributionto the survival of Iraqi intellectual traditions. Furthermore, by originally penning their works in Arabic, Sinan Antoon, Dunya Mikhail and other subaltern writers speak, both literally and discursively, to a non-Western, non-Anglophone interlocutor. In Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in a Time of Terror, Hamid Dabashi suggests that postcolonial critics have to ‘put an end to the idea of “Europe”, or a fortiori “the West”, as the principle interlocutor of the world – for it is not. It is a terrible and terrifying abstraction’ (Dabashi, 2009: 272). To that end, Dabashi is critical of Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak for having: EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES 139 a white Euro-American interlocutor at the center of [their]
narrative attention, moral outrage, and argumentative persistence – as if trying hard to convince him (and it is always a ‘him’) of the atrocities of colonialism around the globe – as if unless and until this fictive white male interlocutor is not convinced that the horrors of colonialism actually took place, then they did not in fact happen at all.(273) Collectively, the Iraqi writers covered in this essay, particularly those who first published their work in Arabic, launch a postcolonial epistemic insurrection. They do so by changing ‘the very alphabet of reading the world’(278), and by speaking to the world in a language that is not ‘trapped in a circuitous discourse of merely talking back to the self-appointed interlocutors of the world’(278). Writing against the US empire’s assault on Iraqi biological and social life, and thus performing a defiant act of survival in the face of neocolonial necropolitics, they ‘write back’(see Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, 2002) with a twist: by writing in Arabic, they signal that theirimplied reader is not, in fact, the (neo)colonial power, but fellow subaltern Iraqis/Arabs.Debate is always about Performance – speech is the performative acts of our affective attachments to institutions – forcing debaters to confront their Performances is a method of unsettling white spaces, and a prerequisite to policyChambers-Letson 13, Joshua. A Race So Different: Performance and Law in Asian America. NYU Press, 2013. (associate professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University who researches and teaches courses in performance studies, critical race theory, political theory, and queer of color critique)// Elmer and SJ DH recut CL AASo far, I have discussed the relationship of the law to performance, but I have only peripherally discussed the performativity of the law. The law is performative. It is composed of linguistic utterancesand acts(statutes, policies, executive memos, judicial opinions)that do more than describe the world, because they produce a doingin it through their very utterance or inscription.In the language of J. L. Austin, Justice Harlan’s declaration that the Chinese are “a race so different” is not constative; it is performative.46 That is, Harlan did not in fact “‘describe’ or ‘report’ or constate anythingat all,” because in the uttering of the phrase, he achieved the doing of something.47 Agents of the lawdo more than determine facts; they produce subjects through their performative utterances. As Austin observed, “a judge’s ruling makes law; a jury’s finding makes a convicted felon.”48 Harlan’s declaration mustthus be understood as part of a network of performative utterances that produced and confirmed the exceptional legal status of Asian Americans by naming and simultaneously “making” them into a “race so different.” Although legal discourse masquerades as factual and descriptive, it isin fact central to the productionof social meaning and reality through its enunciation. Legal discourse forgets its own performative power, transforming a court’s performative utterance into a codified reality. Whether or not the person subject to a jury’s finding committed the felony, the jury’s finding makes him or her a convicted felon as a fact of law unless and until a higher authority intervenes to overturn this determination. As Austin warned, “Of all people, jurists should be best aware of the true state of affairs. Perhaps some now are. Yet they will succumb to their own timorous fiction, that a statement of‘the law’ is a statement of fact.”49 But the United States has a stare decisis system, whereby a decision in a given case will determine future application of the law. In such a system, a jurist may never have to succumb to this timorous fiction because a court that makes a factually erroneous determination transforms this error into a legal fact just by uttering it. Stare decisis allows a statement of law to retroactively become a statement of fact at the exact moment that a judge’s ruling exceeds the constative function of a legal declarationin order to make law, to make a convicted felon, to make an enemy combatant, or to make Asian Americans into a race so different. The law’s misrecognition of Bashir as an “enemy combatant” in Lidless may well have been a fiction,
but this was cold comfort to the man as he suffered in his Guantánamo cell. In many ways, little has changed since Thomas Hobbes issued his famous maxim, auctoritas non veritas facit legem (authority, not truth, makes the law), and this has grave con- sequences for racialized subjects when they are caught up within and misrecognized by the law. Because a legal declaration announces itself as the articulation of an established legal fact at the same time that it makes the law, the legal production of subjects is neither purely constative nor purely performative but both. As Jacques Derrida argued in his analysis of the US Declaration of Independence, it is precisely the“undecidability between, let’s say, a performativestructure anda constative structure, [that] is required in order to produce the sought-after effect” of giving simultaneous birth to a nationand the national subjects(“We the People”) that authorize this event.50 The law makes We the People, but, at the same time, it only comesinto being asWe the People play their properly cast roleas We the People. In chapter 3’s analysis of performances of patriotism in the Japanese American concentration camps of World War Two, I further demonstrate how it is in performance that the people realize the constitutional being and constitutive power of the state. This occurs through embodied acts that correlate with the formal ideals of the state, such as the Constitution or the law. Performance makes the nation. It is also what makes national and racial subjects. The juridical performative can only go so far in making us into We the People or transforming Asian America into “a race so different.” As a result, the interplay between legal performativity and embodied acts, or performances, is key to understanding how racialization occurs. By now the reader has hopefully noticed that we are gliding across the slippery ground between performativity and performance, or what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Andrew Parker describe as a “generalized iterability, a per- vasive theatricality common to stage and world alike.”51 The mechanisms productive of national and racial subjects are inherently theatrical, an assertion that I can best explicate through a close reading of a classic and paradigmatic example of subject production, Louis Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Describing “ideological state apparatuses” as the means by which the state reproduces a population’s “submission to the ruling ideology,” Althussersuggests that the state does not simply force itself on the subject but is most effective when it can seducelarge masses of the people into willing submission.52 Tellingly, he defines the law as both a repressive state apparatus and an ideological state apparatus(it is the only state apparatus that enjoys this dual status).53 And ashis paradigmatic example, he famously describes a“theoretical scene [la scène théoretique]” in which a police officer shouts out “hey you there,” and the hailed person turns around.54 Submitting to the recognition of the hail, “he [or she][they] becomes[become] a subject” for the law.55 The word scène in Althusser’s descrip- tion of interpellation translates as both “scene” and “stage,” figuring the act of interpellation as a dramatic act, or a staged encounter between the law and the subject. Later, he even describes his illustration as “my little theoretical theater [notre petit théâtre théoretique].”56 If we are to take seriously the metaphors by which he explains the process of interpella- tion, we see that “one becomes” or is “made” a subject through theatrical protocols. Althusser is situated in a long tradition of Marxist criticism that relies on metaphors of performance. Marx himself describes commodities as circulating between “dramatis personae”; he refers to the market as a “stage,” narrates the tale of a table that is “dancing of its own free will,” and states that “the great events and characters of world history” occur as either “high tragedy” or “low farce.”57 But Althusser does more than simply invoke a rhetoric of theatricality to explain subject production; he shows us how subjection is itself a dramatic ritual. Elsewhere he even suggests that theatrical spectatorship can be a means for the making of a revolutionary, class-conscious form of subjectivity. In a short and oft- overlooked essay on the playwrights Carlo Bertolazzi and Bertolt Brecht, published in the decade before he wrote the essay on ideology, Althusser claimed that theater has the capacity for inspiring “the production of a new consciousness in the spectator” and, in the making of a new con- sciousness, a new mode of political subjectivity: “the play is really the production of a new spectator, an actor who starts where the perfor- mance ends, who only starts so as to complete it, but in life.”58 Through the experience of a truly revolutionary theater, Althusser’s spectator becomes an “actor” who carries the momentum of the play out into the world, performing in a fashion that will realize the play’s revolutionary ambitions, “but in life.” The language of theatricality in the process of subjection conjures a similar image, as one is made a subject for the law by performing in response and accordance to its hail. Thus, subjection is both a legal and political process as well as a theatrical and aesthetic one. Subjection occurs through performance as the legal, the political, and the aesthetic mix together across the body. Mimicry is the best starting point for any strategy of decolonization or necropolitical movementsGalvan Alvarez 20, Enrique Galvan-Alvarez,Ole, 5-4-2020, "Decolonising the state: subversion, mimicry and criminality," Taylor & Francis,
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13688790.2020.1752356?fbclid=IwAR2Kit5p2nRrNnH23M331FuGb40a1AszwfDE7qAR2uCTwWfzpL7b6zSfCso& \\ The issue of subverting the colonial regime has been present since the birth of anti-colonial resistance, which arguably begins with the inception of colonialism itself. 21 Any attemptat subvertingthe colonialstructures of power, whether bymeans of insurrection, peaceful resistance or infiltration is faced withthe conundrum that the pre-colonial stateof affairs can never be fully restored. 22 The concept of mimicry plays akey role in any project of decolonization, since engagingthe colonizers always involves, to some degree, mirroringtheir movements and speaking their language. 23 The ambiguousact of mimicrycontains both a subversive promise and a conservative temptation, which is perfectly instantiated inthe practices of postcolonial states. 24 Subverting or decolonizing the state displays the same ambiguity, as subversion and decolonization require some form of engagement with the colonial regime. This is clearly demonstrated in practices of war, propaganda and necropolitics across the postcolonial world (for example, in Syria, Iraq, South Sudan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, CAR), which contain multiple elements of mimicry among belligerent states or factions. 25 Successfully fightingan enemy involves engaging and mirroring, to some extent, its military, disciplinary, rhetorical and political practices. Further, organizingthe post colony involvesthe unavoidable conundrum of having to relate tothe legal, political and military structuresof the colonial regime. 26 Insofar as the pre-colonial state of affairs is irretrievable, mimicry is always present inany process of decolonization, consistently posing the question of whether colonialism is being subverted or reinstated.The subverted states analyzed in this special issue find themselves often replicated in their resistant rivals. Whether such an ambiguity represents the ultimate victory of the colonial state or its ironic demise remains an open question, which in turn keeps the processes of decolonization ever relevant, changing and alive. Turning to another form of subversive mimicry, the connection between criminality andpostcolonial discourse leads toa productive interrogation ofthe blurred dynamics of power operating both within and outside the state. Itallows for an exploration of the process of decolonization that goes beyond the canonical dichotomies of oppressor and oppressed. Exploring the cultural resonance of criminal discourses, Chris Cunneen argues that criminality reshapes ‘the meaning of evidence and provides alternative narratives’.27 As criminalization is dependent on historical, political amnesia and on processes of ‘othering’ and racialisation, there is a strong connection between the discourse on crime and nation-building typical of colonial societies. 28 As Comaroff and Comaroff point out, criminality acts today as an imaginative vehicle for thinking about the threats to the nation and for posing ‘more law and order as the appropriate means of dealing with them’. 29 Criminal narratives are used by the state to claim that the pathologies of colonial and postcolonial societies are the natural consequences of a lack of progress. In response to these ossified narratives, this special issue takes into consideration how the discourse on criminality ‘unhinges colonial law as an abstract expression of power and grounds it firmly in the lived experiences’ of the oppressed. 30 It will also investigate the extent to which the ambiguous positioning of the underworld's activities, both within and outside the official spaces of power, at once ‘mimics’ and challenges the gradual corporatisation of the state. Such ambiguous positionings and the criminalisation of resistance to the colonial state have been associated with anarchism since its inception as an organised movement with its own distinct theoretical and practical expression in the late 1860s. Emerging from the debates in the First International, anarchism posed a challenge to European colonial projects from a myriad of perspectives. Indeed, if European colonialism required a strong, centralised state apparatus to control and administer territories across the world, anti-imperial resistances were inherent to anarchism’s anti-statist tenets. 31 More than anti-statism, however, the broad anarchist tradition’s challenge to imperialism stemmed from its opposition to social and economic inequality. As Errico Malatesta remarked in L’Anarchia: ‘[t]he inhabitant of Naples is as concerned in the improvement to the living conditions of the people inhabiting the banks of the Ganges … as he is in the drainage of the fondaci of his own city’. 32 Connecting transnational networks of resistance, Malatesta gestures towards the strategic solidarities between European workers and colonial subjects required to realise visions of anarchy. Extending such strategic solidarities transnationally, anarchists were also among the first to ‘capitalize on the transoceanic migrations of the era’, allowing for anarchism to flourish across the colonial world. 33 However, through this expansion, anarchism risks becoming another European paradigm exported to the colonies, complicit in the very processes it seeks to undermine. 34 Anarchism’s real challenge to the colonial project lies less in the ‘contact zones’ of imperial labour structures, and more, in the praxis of resistance through direct action. 35 This is not to suggest that anarchists across the colonial world did not join anti-colonial movements but rather that, in doing so, anarchism’s revolutionary potential often mutated to accommodate the historic appeal of nationalism. Despite their anti-statist principles, anarchists often collaborated with anti-colonial nationalists, signalling that dismantling overarching structures of power was the central and most important struggle/goal. To understand its postcolonial significance, anarchism must be approached as an anti-colonial movement through which libertarian theories and practices were appropriated as articulations of resistance to the colonial state. In other words, decolonising the state through anarchist eyes does not necessarily require us to abandon nationalism but to critically engage with the historical, theoretical and practical processes that make up the colonial state. This special issue opens with Laura Galian-Hernandez’s essay ‘Decolonising Sexualitiy in Egypt: al-Tatawwur’s Struggle for Liberation’, which examines the ways in which issues of sexuality, the body and gender were instrumentalised in the struggle for liberation in the early 1940s. Focusing on the literary magazine al-Tatawwur, Galian Hernandez explores the Egyptian intellectual left’s challenges to the newly formed nation-state and argues that prostitution, sexual desire and contraceptives played a key role in the process of decolonising the state through subversion. Following this, Enrique Galvan-Alvarez’s article ‘Rojava: a State Subverted or Reinvented?’ explores the Kurdish governance that emerged from the fragmented sovereignties of the Syrian civil war (2011–2015). Aiming to decolonise the Middle East, Kurdish militias have implementedan allegedly stateless and anti-statist systemin the territories they control in Northern Syria (Rojava Kurdistan). Their political projectand military success against ISIS,Al-Nusra and other Islamist factions have attracted support from the international left and from global powers like the United States and Russia. Not surprisingly, the Rojava project is made up ofmultiple and ambiguous practices of rhetorical, political and military mimicry. This essay focuses on the challenges faced by an anti-statist project of decolonisation, which needs to engage a number of states in order to survive and, therefore, has to function and perform itself as a state. Maria Ridda’s essay ‘Capitalism, Criminality and the State: The Origins of Illegal Urban Modernity’ investigates how transnational criminal organisations, as forces acting outside formally constituted authorities, challenge traditional reconfigurations of the postcolonial and world city. Mimicking the contours of the neoliberal economy, criminal syndicates develop as a result of the economic, social and historical entanglements between North and South, state and anti-state, legal and illegal economies. The effects of transnational criminal organisations on the city generate a number of spaces that refuse to be categorised within conventional hierarchies of power, and unveil a number of grey areas that reveal and challenge alternative reconfigurations of Western modernity. As the privileged site of inhabitations of ‘colonial histories and postcolonial proximities’, the city deploys what Chambers calls an ‘unauthorised modernity’ where Otherness is characterised by marginal discourses. 36 As one of such discourses, criminality provides a magnifying lens that refuses to be incorporated into heteronormative understandings of oppressor and oppressed. This is particularly relevant in those contexts where the lack of state intervention justifies criminal narratives ‘as both enabling and disabling tools of authority’. 37 Developing further this dichotomy, the essay foregrounds the connection between the dynamics of subalternity and the development of criminal organisations as forces operating in concurrence with the dynamics of turbo-capitalism and ‘outside the state’. 38 Focusing also on the cultural resonance of subversion in Aung San Suu Kyi’s Freedom from Fear 39 and Pascal Khoo Thwe’s From the Land of Green Ghosts, 40 Pavan Malreddy’s article ‘Subalter-Nation:
Narrating Burma’ examines how the discourses of nation-building in Burma are inextricably linked to sovereign ambitions of state-building through militaristic and insurgent means. In particular, it focuses on the contested nature of both nation- and state-building ideologies in Burma that are characterised by a rift within their respective modes of narration: national autobiography and subaltern autobiography. The genre of national autobiography, which is commonly associated with the life histories of national leaders, has gained considerable attention in recent literary criticism. This article observes that while Suu Kyi’s autobiography remains complicit with elite nationalism, Pascal Khoo Thwe’s life narrative charts Burmese national history through individual and communal trajectories. Within this, the article introduces the notion of subalter-nation as a narrative mode of subaltern autobiography that forges the means of another national consciousness through insurgent and secessionist sovereign ambitions. Shifting the focus to Latin America, María do mar Castro Varela and Carolina Tamayo Rojas’ essay ‘Epistemicide, postcolonial resistance and the state’ examines the example of the Inga community, a cross-border Indigenous community in the northern Andes as an example of an autonomous grassroots democracy. Throwing light on the ‘exchange tradition’ between north-Quechua communities in the border zone between south-west Colombia and north-west Ecuador, they demonstrate how this tradition has permitted the formation of supra-national spaces that challenge the idea of the nation-state. In the final article, ‘“Anarchism, pure and simple”: M. P. T. Acharya, Anti-Colonialism and the International Anarchist Movement’, Ole Birk Laursen traces the life and activities of the Indian anarchist M. P. T. Acharya from 1907 to 1954. Drawing on archival material from across Britain, France, Germany, Sweden and Russia, this article explores, firstly, how Acharya charted a different path towards independence than those of his contemporaries such as Gandhi, M. N. Roy and Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, and, secondly, how Acharya attempted to bring anarchism into India’s independence struggles. Through an analysis of Acharya’s essays on anarchism, the article argues that his activities within the international anarchist movement broadens our conception of the reach of anarchism and enables a more nuanced understanding of anti-colonial struggles against the totalised oppression of the state. In doing so, it redirects our attention towards theoretical conceptions of non-statist nationalism within a postcolonial framework. As a long and varied history suggests, from its inception in the nineteenth century, the state has been challenged from a variety of angles. Across the non-Western world, age-old structures of governance were dismantled to give way to colonial regimes, in the process maximising profit and capital for the European powers. But challenges emerged from the beginning, charting other ways of conceiving the post-independent nation other than through the vision of the state. However, while such subversive narratives contribute greatly to our understanding of the postcolonial nation and its colonial legacies, these stories have rarely been awarded the critical attention they demand. In bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to reflect on the ways in which the colonial and postcolonial state has been challenged, this special issue seeks to cast a decolonial eye over the state by focusing on act acts of subversion, mimicry and criminality. In doing so, it opens new routes to understanding the emotional and historical forces of state-formation and its decline.Mimicry is not just Spanish but more and must be taken seriously – branding through English-centric norms recreates European forms of orientalism central to hegemony over other landsSreeja 19,V Sreeja, 20-01-2019, "Babu English: Mimicry and Subversion in Language," IOSR Journal Of Humanities And Social Science (IOSR-JHSS) , http://www.iosrjournals.org/iosr-jhss/papers/Vol.%2024%20Issue2/Series-1/B2402011317.pdf?fbclid=IwAR2q4ce19wLg-wL1mRQU25QRe9TtGYXHlrJsigskvrP46jPFEs6AqMngAj8 \\ In his essay “Of Mimicry and Man,” Bhabha describes mimicry as unintentionally subversive. According to him, mimicry isa kind of performance that exposesthe artificiality or hypocrisy ofall symbolic expressions of power. It is an exaggerated mimickingand exaggeration produces repetition with difference. Mimicry thereby mocks and undermines the pretensions of colonialism and empire. “. . . colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite. Which is to say, that the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry mustcontinually produceits slippage, its excess, its difference.” Bhabha(1994: 122) The “excess or slippage” produced by the ambivalencein mimicry rupturesthe colonial discourseand converts the colonized into“a partial presence”, an incomplete presence that is defined by some strategic drawback within the discourse itself. “The success of colonial appropriation depends on a proliferation of inappropriate objects that ensure its strategic failure, so that mimicry is at once resemblance and menace.”Bhabha (1994: 123) Bhabha cites several texts as example, one of which is Macaulay‟s Minute in which Macaulay conceives of "a class of interpreters between us and themillions whom we govern-a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, butEnglish in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect." as the products of English education.Here Bhabha says “The great tradition of European Humanism seems capable only of ironizing itself.”Bhabha (1994: 124) The colonizer is thus in a dual psychic stage informed by both desire and derision for the native which results in the creation of stereotypes. This fractured nature of the colonial discourse creates a dual state of mimicry by the native for which Bhabha uses the term hybridity.The colonizer and the colonized enter the Third Space where the hierarchy is subverted resulting in a complex power relationship. “It is from this area between mimicry and mockery, where the reforming, civilizing mission is threatened by the displacing gaze of its disciplinary double”Bhabha (1994: 123) his instances of mimicry arise. The notion of the white man‟s burden, the noble task of civilizing the morally and intellectually deficient natives, through instruction in the English language and literature takes a setback in the case of the Babu. The comical Babu and his funny English being products of the English education offered in India reveal the ambivalence and rupture inthe discourse of the civilizing mission of imperialism. In the attempt to elevate 144) In both these instances the writers inhabit a hybrid space andtheir discourse is a complex interminglingof Indian and English. It also endorses the argument that the motivation for learning English among the middle and lower classes was instrumental unlike the elite for whom, as Mukherjee suggests, it was the language of the personal space and creative
expression. This argument is supported by the fact that a good number of letters in these collections are requests for jobs or economic assistance, the claim to which being the writer‟s high proficiency in English (the state of which of course his letter betrays).Sir, Being educated in the Calcutta and by your favour passed B.A. examination I now venture to approach the throne of your goodness… SIR, I am an expert in many things and desire only to be tried to show my agility in mathematics and other languages being hopeful to stand on my own bottom without help… TWJ (1890: 7) The following is an advertisement: “Notice is hereby given that this Medical Court is advantageous to every patient suffering from feet swelling, who can be cured by my Medical treatment. Any man belonging to this or any out country, suffering from Magic or Devils that cannot be cured by English or Native doctors, is sure to be cured by my treatment. . . Asthma or Cough will be cured by me and Empress of India shall receive the blessings of such cured Patients.” TWJ (1890: 48-49) The Babu here makes a mockery of the benign aims of English education. One among the numerous of its kind, this advertisement, is an instance of colonial appropriation on the part of the colonized who uses English, the language of rationality and power and the modern medium of press to sell his native superstition. Sly Civility is another term that Bhabha uses to describe the act of mimicry.He defines it as an “offturning” response, as “the native refusal to satisfy the colonizer‟s narrative demand.” Bhabha(1994: 141) It denotes a refusal cloaked in the outward form of obedience, both civility” and “slyness” in one. In response to the master‟s demand, the colonized exerts a surreptitious counter pressure, performing their indirect speech act of evasion or passive resistance under the cover of a direct speech act of acquiescence. In the letter below, the writer‟s requests for a job in the PWD is highly servile. Throughout the letter he expresses the difficulty in caring for a “grate famly, large suns and dauters with magnified appetites.” TWJ (1890: 141) He addresses the receiver “Most Preserved Sir” and calls himself “humble man” and “poor man”. He then goes on to say … and your honor is the P W Department which is great sirculated Department, building big walls and bridges which falling down, no matter for that, make the money. And though because your mighty honor is now compleately dismissed for procuring the cash yet still much influence is with your honor in wide space of Area of P W Department. TWJ (1890: 141) The „poor man‟ very slyly hints at the corrupt nature of the English officer and thereby challenges his authority, implying that the officer cannot deny his claim for the job. The response of the English to these specimens and their collection is equally remarkable. They collected these specimens and published them not only for plain amusement but also as matter needing grave attention. T. W. J. in the introduction to his collection clearly states the ambivalent state of “the system of Education introduced and supported by the State, which has already caused a vast amount of misery among the working classes.” TWJ (1890: i) There were also textbooks of grammar meant exclusively for Indian students. George Clifford Whitworth in his book Indian English: An Examination of the Errors Made by Indians in Writing English says his purpose is “perfectly serious” (as opposed to that of the compilers of Babu English), which is to “render them a small service by showing them how their admirable knowledge of our language may be made still more complete.” Whitworth (1907: 6) Within the Third space the Englishman tries to please the colonized and appear benevolent. He argues for the need of the Babu‟s education, laments the failure of the system and offers correction. The title of one of these texts has the phrase“our Aryan Brethern”. The colonizer moves down the hierarchy to reach down to the Indian and he seeks a brother - “almost the same but not quite” as the next moment he alsostereotypes the Babu figure.Bhabha states that the locus of the stereotype lies within theambivalence, that is, “ambivalence of the object of colonial discourse – that „otherness‟ which is at once an object of desire and derision, an articulation of difference” Bhabha(1994: 67) Both the Babu and his English were stereotyped and stigmatized by the English. The Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911 defines a Babu as “a native Indian clerk” and adds that the term “… is generally used contemptuously as signifying a semi-literate native, with a mere veneer of modern education.” (n.p.) The Hobson Jobson defines a Babu as “[p]roperly a term of respect attached to a name like Master or Mister. . . it is often used with a slight savor of disparagement, as characterizing a superficially cultivated but often effeminate Bengali . . . the word has come often to signify „a native clerk who writes English.‟” Yule &Burnell(1986: 44) As the title of his book Indian English and Indian Character suggests,Underwood derives conclusions about the character of Indians from the English (rather the letters) they write. Citing various kinds of letters, he proves that Hindus are over complaisant and dependent. He adds that the education has failed to induce morality, referring to letters that request for free/undeserved marks in exams. He also notices their strong “susceptibility to emotions” Underwood (1885: 76) in a letter where a student on realizing his failure in mathematics exam exclaims “Ah!! death why does thou not put end to my life.” Underwood (1885: 74) The Babu or mimic man is a recurrent figure in many colonial, postcolonial literatures representing the ridiculed/traumatized colonized. However writers and critics are seldom interested in his language. The analysis of Babu English presents the emanations of mimicry in written language and in a non-fictitious genre. It also sheds light on several features of Indian English as both share many linguistic, discoursal features. The collections of Babu English also contain letters and other articles that are written in impeccable English. By branding these „Babu‟ the colonizer marginalizes them asfunny and derisive. In Orientalism Edward Said argues that “representations of the „Orient‟ (…) contributed tothe creation of a dichotomy between Europe andits „others‟, a dichotomy thatwas central to the creation of European cultureas well as to the maintenance andextension of European hegemony overother lands.” In Loomba (1998:44) The compilation, classification and the framing ofa particular knowledge as Babu English is yet another instance of Orientalist politics.Contesting performance only builds skill for coalitions building – this debate is key to unravel meaning in the affConquergood 1,CULTURAL STRUGGLES: PERFORMANCE, ETHNOGRAPHY, PRAXIS by Dwight Conquergood, E. Patrick JohnsonFREDERIK, LAURIE. Theatre Journal, vol. 66, no. 4, 2014, pp. 646–647., www.jstor.org/stable/24580485. Accessed 15 Apr. 2020. // Peggy Phelan has presented us with a challenging exercise: to identify a key issue, a pressing point of intersection between our local institution and the more expansive future of the field-and, she has enjoined us to be brief. I offer the following principle more as a catalyst for opening conversation than a proposition for closing down controversy. The starting point for discussionthat I affirm isthis: Performanceis an essentially contested concept. I borrow this idea from Strine, Long, and Hopkins' fine metadisciplinary essay, "Research in Interpretation and Performance Studies: Trends, Issues, Priori- ties" (I99o).' Thinking about performance as an "essentially contested concept" locates disagreementand difference asgenerative points of departure and coalition for its unfolding meanings and affiliations. Any attempt todefine and stabilize performance will be bound up in disagreement, and thisdisagree- mentis itself part of its meaning: Thus, we understand not just that others disagree, but that this disagreement isinevitable and healthy. [...] Factions in the controversy do not expect to defeat or silence opposing positions, but rather through con- tinuing dialogue to attain a sharper articulation of all positions and there- fore a fuller understanding of the conceptual richness of performance. (Strine, Long, and Hopkins 1990:183) The idea that performance is a contested and contesting practice rings true for me in my dual role as an ethnographer of cultural performance and as an administrator of an academic department of performance studies. What I have
learned from both fields-ethnographic "fieldwork" as well as the disciplinary "field" of performance studies-is that performance flourishes within a zone of contest and struggle. That observation is as true for the everyday resisting performance practices of subaltern groups as it is for performance studies pro- grams. Life on the margins can be a source of creativity as well as constraint, what Michel de Certeau described as "makeshift creativity" and a mobile art of "making do" (1984:xiv, 29). Performance studiesis a border discipline, an interdiscipline, that cultivates thecapacity to move between structures forge connections, to see together, to speak with instead of simply speaking about or for others. Performance privileges threshold-crossing, shape-shifting, and boundary-violating figures, such as shamans, tricksters, and jokers, who value the carnivalesque over thecanonical, the transformative over the nor- mative, the mobile over the monumental. Victor Turner, inspired by his performance ethnography collaborations with Richard Schechner, coined the epigrammatic view of "performance as making, not faking" (1982:93). His constructional theory foregrounded the culture-creating capacities of performance and functioned as a challenge and counterproject to the "antitheatrical prejudice" that, since Plato, has aligned performance with fakery and falsehood (Barish 1981). After his sustained work on social drama, cultural performance, liminality, and, of course, definition of humankind as homo performans, it would be hard for anyone to hold a "mere sham and show" view of performance. Turner shifted thinking about perfor- mance from mimesis to poiesis. Now, the current thinking about performance constitutes a shift from poiesis to kinesis. Turner's important work on the productive capacities of performance set the stage for a more poststructuralist and political emphasis on performance as kinesis, as movement, motion, fluidity, fluctuation, all those restless energies that transgress boundaries and trouble closure. Thus, postcolonial critic Homi K. Bhabha deployed the term "performative" to re- fer to action that incessantly insinuates, interrupts, interrogates, antagonizes, and decenters powerful master discourses, which he dubbed "pedagogical" (1994:146-49). From Turner's emphatic view of performance as making not faking, we move to Bhabha's politically urgent view of performance as breaking and remaking.2 Any attempt to define and stabilize performance will be bound up in disagreement, and this disagreement is itself part of its meaning. Donna Haraway argues for a performance-friendly worldview, a "reinven- tion of nature," in which "objects" of study are actively engaged and seen as dynamic "agents": "we must rethink the world as witty actor and agent of transformation, a coding trickster with whom we must learn to converse" (1991:201). Performance studies, in Haraway's view, would be the search for trickster figures "that might turn a stacked deck into a potent set of wild cards, jokers, for refiguring possible worlds" (4). Kinesis unleashes centrifugal forces that keep culture in motion, ideas in play, hierarchies unsettled, and academic disciplines alert and on the edge: "the guerilla tactics of multiple, uneasily jos- tling theories and stories can at least disrupt the smug assumptions of comfort- ably settled monologics" (Tsing 1993:33).3 And now I turn to the second part of Phelan's challenge: to sketch the local institutional context where performance issues and ideas take shape. Anna Tsing's rethinking of "the local" is relevant for my sketch of a particular insti- tutional configuration of performance studies: "By 'local,' I do not mean to invoke tiny bounded communities, but rather acts of positioning within par- ticular contexts" (3 1). I chair the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. Housed within the School of Speech, Performance Studies attracts a robust mix of faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate majors. They are an unruly and rambunctious group. I tremble before the task of summarizing them. They give new meaning to the idea of performance as a creative and contentious space--and I say that with the utmost respect and af- fection. However, my task in representing them is made less daunting by the fact that many of my Northwestern colleagues, graduate students, alumnae, and undergraduate majors are attending and participating in this conference. They are quite able to speak for themselves. Collectively, their presentations at this conference reflect the diverse array of performance perspectives and projects that defines our program. Having said all that, still it might be pos-sible to set forth some shared commitments that provide common ground, meeting places, in the midst of all the eclecticism. Here goes: Most of us at Northwestern are committed to a bracing dialectic between performance theory and practice. We believe that theory is enliv- ened and most rigorously tested when it hits the ground in practice. Likewise, we believe that artistic practice can be deepened, complicated, and challenged in meaningful ways by engaging critical theory. What all this means is that our curriculum, from freshman gateway course to advanced doctoral seminar, embraces courses in which students perform as an embodied way of knowing, as a supplement to (not a substitute for) the more conventional epistemologies and pedagogies of reading and discussing texts, writing research papers, con- ducting fieldwork, and so forth. Stated succinctly: at Northwestern we take performance as both subject and method of research. And I should make it clear for newcomers to performance studies that our students by and large are not performing plays: the study of dramatic texts at Northwestern is handled most excellently by our neighbors in the Department of Theatre. Because the study of canonical plays and their production processes and histories by no means exhausts the range of performance genres and practices, the perfor- mance studies department picks up where the theatre department stops: the study of nondramatic texts and nonelite performance practices. We have fac- ulty in our department who specialize in the adaptation and staging of fic- tional and nonfictional texts alongside scholars of Yoruba ritual performance. Because of the division of labor, we have an excellent relationship with the theatre department, remarkably free of border disputes and turf struggles. We also are in intellectual and institutional solidarity with anthropologists, literary critics, and ethnomusicologists, as well as other interdisciplinary programs such as cultural studies, women's studies, African studies, diaspora studies, and queer studies. The distinctive contribution we bring to the table is the heuris-tic potential of performance as concept, practice, and epistemology. [T]heory is enlivened and most rigorously tested when it hits the ground in practice. Likewise, we believe that artistic prac- tice can be deepened, complicated, and challenged in mean- ingful ways by engaging critical theory. Another way to express our departmental commitment to a theory-practice dialectic is to say that many of us endeavor, not so much to position as to pivot our work on a turning point among analytical, artistic, and activist perspectives. We believe in the replenishing coarticulation of analytical insights, artistic ener- gies, and activist struggles-approaches to problems that all too often are segre- gated, polarized, or pitted against one another. I think that our departmental commitment to praxis, to multiple ways of knowing that engage embodied ex- perience with critical reflection is strengthened structurally by the fact that we have both an undergraduate major and a PhD program. Our undergraduates are unusually bright but, like most undergraduates, they have little taste for jargon or tolerance for undue abstraction; certainly they hold our feet close to the ground of experience. On the other hand, our doctoral students keep pushing the limits and advancing the conceptual frontier of what counts as performance studies. Many of them work on dissertation projects for which they have some- thing at stake, both personally and politically. The interaction between under- graduate majors and PhD students in performance studies is complex and mutually invigorating. Certainly it would be simpler to devote all our energy and resources either to an undergraduate or a PhD program, but, ultimately, I think it would be less interesting. There are important and lively points of intersection and exchange between the undergraduate and PhD programs, but even their different and sometimes competing concerns, demands, and agendas all help to keep things stirred up and moving. I will leave you with a resonant quotation from Gloria Anzaldiia: "the future depends onthe breaking downof paradigms, it depends on the straddling of two or more cultures"(1987:80). Anzaldiia was speaking about the future of the planet, but this insight is just as relevant for "the future of the field" of performance studies. Instead of a stable, monolithic paradigm of performance studies, I prefer to think in terms of a caravan: a heterogenous ensemble of ideas and methods on the move.
Our theory of power explains the formation of economic exploitation which manifested through broader forms of border racialization – bracketed for gendered languageMarquez 12,“Latinos as the ‘Living Dead’: Raciality, expendability, and border militarization,” Macmillan Publishers, Latino Studies (2012) 10, 473–498. doi:10.1057/lst.2012.39 // John D. Marquez received his PhD from the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of California, San Diego. He is currently Assistant Professor in the African American Studies Department and Latina/o Studies Program at Northwestern University. He specializes in contemporary racial politics, racial violence, critical race theory, Black-Latino politics, Afro-Latino history, globalization/neoliberalism, borderlands and immigration, anti-racist movements, Black and Latino gangs, and urban criminology. He has appeared on television programs such as NBC Nightly News and in many major newspapers and magazines as an expert analyst of the social meaning of race. His forthcoming book (University of Texas Press) examines the merging of Black and Latino oppositional cultures in response to police brutality and other conditions of injustice in the gulf south (E-mail: j-marquez@northwestern.edu). Whatthen has allowed for [Latinx] immigrants(and often citizens) to dieso routinely at the border, as part of a law enforcement strategy that does not work, in ways that areirreducible to a conspiracy for capitalist exploitationand in ways that seems to clearly exceed their legal rights? In an attempt to answer this question, I am proposing a model that I define as the racial state of expendability. This model is a blend of two different paradigms: (i) more general theories regarding the relationship between race, systemic violence, the law, sovereignty, and European modernity, and (ii) literature that theorizes settler colonialism as a violent component of White supremacy in the United States and that considers how this violence has been manifest, in particular, within the US–Mexico borderlands and in ways that have victimized the Latino population writ large. Thisblended theorizationis being proposed to suggest thatthe recent increase in deathand violence isbut the latest manifestation ofa much more complex matrix of power/knowledge interfaces, some derived from the sociologics inherent to European modernity and some from the uniqueways that Latinidad and the borderlands have been “racialized” withinthe broader“racial formation of the US” (Omi and Winant, 1994).Thisresultant conditionof life devaluation, or expendability with legal impunity, is not a mere consequenceof ora tool forbroader plans foreconomic exploitation. By contrast, expendability represents a baseor foundational effect of power through whichplans for economic exploitation can beand have been instantiated. The following represents a guide for how this theorization has been reached and how it is evidenced. The first section of this essay introduces the aforementioned and more general theoretical models that I am appropriating. The second section builds upon the historiography of the US–Mexico borderlands to map out the particularities through which the racial state of expendability has been manifest as of late. The third section locates and illuminates the racial state of expendability within the discourse produced by state agents regarding border militarization. The fourth section theorizes the difficulties faced by legal practitioners to defend the rights of Latino immigrants and citizens who have been victimized by border violence. The last section discusses how borderlands activists and artists have attempted to expose and invert the racial state of expendability as a method to reclaim a space within the domain of universal justice.Resist even if you think the aff doesn’t normatively solve – burden of rejoinder makes it our burden to solve for other racialized bodies, but it should only be to surviveCacho 12Bracketed or gendered language***[Lisa Marie (.Associate Professor of Latina/Latino Studies and Asian American Studies, with affiliations in Gender and [Wom[x]n's] Studiesand English, at the University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign) Social death: Racialized rightlessness and the criminalization of the unprotected. NYU Press, 2012.]Dismembering social value by refusing “the lure of legibility” re-members the other because it gives us the space to be more critical of the automatic, understandable impulse to deny and be offended by criminalizing stereotypes. In this space, the space of social death, we can re-member the other by asking ourselves: Whom does this rejection really benefit and whom does it hurt? This project is not concerned with whether something is politically practical or logistically possible because these approaches need to assume that legal apparatuses are legitimate and fixable. If we suspend the need to be practical, we might be able see what is possible differently. A focus on social death enables us to start at the places we dare not go because it enables us to privilege the populations who are most frequently and most easily disavowed, those who are regularly regarded with contempt, those whose interests are bracketed at best because to address their needs in meaningful ways requires taking a step beyond what is palatable, practical, and possible. Like Barrett, Hong, and Holland, I find “empowering oppositional narratives” in the devastating spaces of social death and their populations’ abstract existences, but empowering narratives do not necessarily give us happy endings. Nor do they always leave us inspired.85 In the spaces of social death,empowerment is not contingent on taking power or securing small victories. Empowerment comes from deciding that the outcome of struggle doesn’t matter as much as the decision to struggle.Deciding to struggle against all odds armed only with fingers crossed on both hands is both an unusual political strategy and a well-informed worldview. It is a choice premised uponwhat Derrick Bell calls “racial realism.”Racial realism is a form of unthinkable politics because it proposes that webegin battles we’ve already lost, that we acknowledge and accept that everything we do may not ever result in social change.When implementing Racial Realism we must simultaneously acknowledge that our actions arenot likely to lead totranscendent change and, despite our best efforts, may be of more help to the systemwe despise than to the victims of that system we are trying to help. Nevertheless, our realization, and thededication based on that realization, can lead to policy
positionsand campaigns that are less likely to worsen conditions for those we are trying to helpand more likely to remind those in power that there are imaginative, unabashed risk-takers who refuse to be trammeled upon. Yet confrontation with our oppressors is not our sole reason for Racial Realism. Continued struggle can bring about unexpected benefits and gains that in themselves justify continued endeavor. The fight itselfhas meaning and should give us hope for the future.86 Although racial realism takes failure for granted, it does not equate failure with defeat. Accepting hopelessness is notnecessarily equivalent to abandoning hope.As Sara Ahmed writes in her critique of happiness, “To kill joy . . . is to open a life, to make room for life, to make room for possibility, for chance.”87 To take unthinkable politics seriously, we need to entertain counterintuitive thoughts and practice imagining otherwise. “To imagine otherwise,” Fiona Ngô argues, “failure need not be overcome, rehabilitation need not be desired, subjectivity need not be recovered.” Instead, she insists, “we must conceive of an ethical stance that refuses to cover over the violence that brought us to the present.”88 If the critical task is not to resolve the contradictions of reintegrating the socially dead into a capitalist society that sees most of humanity as a necessary but negative resource, then it makes sense to mobilize against preserving this way of life or the ways of knowing that this life preserves. Rather than “breathe life” into the spaces of social death (gentrification, privatization, and democratization), we might conscientiously work against the logic of survivability,89 which in the United States sees the preservation of U.S. capital as central and indispensable to the “American way of life.” In neoliberal ways of knowing, the value of life is subjected to an economic analysis and assessed accordingly: How has this person contributed to society? What will he or she accomplish in the future? Is it worthwhile to invest in this neighborhood and its residents or will such an investment be only a waste of resources? Lives are legibly valuable when they are assessed comparatively and relationally within economic, legal, and political contexts and discourses, framed by a culture of punishment according to the market logic of supply and demand. This means that, for the most part, value is not ascribed to living life in meaningful ways, and it also means that those who are socially devalued do not get to decide what makes a life meaningful or the terms by which their lives are evaluated as meaningful or meaningless, as valuable or valueless. By figuring out new contexts and ways of framing “why life is valuable,” we might figure out how to talk about social problems in ways that do not require us to appeal to market values or to redirect juridical and social repudiation toward other populations that constitute the “negative resource” to American value. Of course, we cannot discount that fighting for basic survival needs in immediate, practical, and strategic