Fugitivity Affirmative—beffjr Note
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- And Im feelin good.
- Dragonfly out in the sun, you know what I mean, dont you know
- Scent of the pine, you know how I feel
- We affirm Nina’s Simone’s “Feeling Good” as an act of fugitivity.
1ac—Nina SimonePlay – https://youtu.be/D5Y11hwjMNs?t=18sIt will start at: 0:18 Press pause/close tab at: 2:52 It's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life for me.Yeah, it's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life for me, ooooooooh...And I'm feelin' good.Fish in the sea, you know how I feelRiver runnin' free, you know how I feelBlossom on the tree, you know how I feelIt's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life for me,And I'm feelin' goodDragonfly out in the sun, you know what I mean, don't you know,Butterflies all havin' fun, you know what I mean.Sleep in peace when day is done: that's what I mean,And this old world is a new world and a bold world for me...Stars when you shine, you know how I feelScent of the pine, you know how I feelYeah, freedom is mine, and I know how I feel… It's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life for me And I'm feelin'... good. ----- Nina Simone’s powerful articulation of freedom first rang out in 1965 but it has echoed as a haunting challenge to the dominant Western episteme of anti-black violence that birthed and sustains domestic surveillance.We affirm Nina’s Simone’s “Feeling Good” as an act of fugitivity.Our sampling of Simone is part of a fugitive poetics that joins artists who attempt to mobilize her tradition of social protest and self-definition, a fluid and complex challenge to anti-blackness that can serve as the basis for pedagogy among listenersModell, 12—Amanda Renae, MA thesis in American Studies @ University of South Florida. “"You Understand Me Now": Sampling Nina Simone in Hip Hop" (2012). Graduate Theses and Dissertations, University of South Florida Scholar Commons http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/4168 --BR The overarching goal of this research is to explicate the implications of hip hop artists sampling Nina Simone’s music in their work. By regarding Simone as a critical social theorist in her own right, one can hear the ways that hip hop artists are mobilizing her tradition of socially active self-definition from the Civil Rights/Black Power era(s) in the post-2000 United States. By examining both the lyrics and the instrumental compositions of Lil Wayne, Juelz Santana, Common, Tony Moon, Talib Kweli, Mary J. Blige and Will.I.Am, G-Unit and Timbaland, and bearing in mind the intersecting oppressions of race, class, gender, and sexuality, this study concludes that the way that these artists employ Simone’s recorded voice in their works oftentimes corresponds to the degree to which they retain her figurative message. While many would assume that these tendencies would correspond with the subgenres of “mainstream” and “conscious” hip hop, in fact the fluidity and complexity of these artists’ positions in subgenre refutes this essentialist notion. By engaging in an intersectional analysis of the political and personal implications of hip hop sampling, this essay provides a critical interpretation of the ways the cultural products of the “Civil Rights era” still operate in contemporary U.S. society. These operations are integral to the human rights struggle in which we are all still very much engaged. In 2010, William Morris Endeavor’s Global Finance and Distribution Group announced plans to produce a biopic of Nina Simone’s life, starring the contemporary “queen of hip hop soul” Mary J. Blige.1 Although production of the film has subsequently been delayed because of scheduling issues with other projects2 the prospect of the project raises an interesting proposition for cultural commentators and the movie-going and music-listening public alike. How is it that this current media superstar will assume the role of such an historically specific figure? Aside from the perfunctory acting classes, piano lessons and vocal training, what does it mean for a black woman in the post-2000 United States to assume the mantle of a cultural giant from the Civil Rights/Black Power era(s) like Nina Simone? In addition, how will the global corporate interests that fund this project shape its production, tone, promotion and reception? And what meaning will audiences gain from it? This is not the first time such questions could be posed of a virtual, intergenerational collaboration between Mary J. Blige and the late Nina Simone. On her 2005 release The Breakthrough Blige features a deceptively powerful track entitled “About You,”3 for which producer Will.I.Am samples Simone’s classic 1965 recording “Feeling Good.”4 While the way that he samples from the track is fairly distinctive, Will.I.Am is far from the only hip hop producer to draw from this recording, or Simone’s catalog in general. Particularly since the singer’s death in 2003, the trend of sampling her music in hip hop has become somewhat pervasive. This trend is significant because Nina Simone articulated an ethic and aesthetic of social activism and self-definition against controlling images throughout her life and work. This overarching framework ran as a consistent thread throughout her personal/professional life, her performance style, and her music. As a black female musician who grew up singing and playing in church in the rural South, Simone’s rise to fame would have fit neatly into an “authentic” blueswoman typology. However her extensive classical training and tenure at Julliard exploded this essentialist image for her audiences and the popular press during her career.5 Further, her virtuosity established her in circles of classical and jazz criticism, traditionally male-dominated “high culture.” By establishing a public persona outside of what was then acceptable for or expected of a black female singer, Nina Simone succeeded in defining herself before the eyes and ears of the U.S. and the world. She used her cultural clout to leverage support for the black freedom struggle, performing at various times for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the Congress for Racial Equality, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Simone created a self-defined public persona as a black woman activist musician who did not conform to the prevailing images of how she “should” behave. This aesthetic and ethical articulation and practice comprise what I will refer to as Nina Simone’s “grammar of cultural production,”6 or critical social theory. Although those in the traditional academe do not generally view musicians as intellectual theorists, regarding Nina Simone as a critical social theorist in her own right is essential to preserving the radical subjectivity that she fought so hard to articulate and maintain in her life and work.7 For a hip hop artist, choosing to sample Nina Simone can be a political or aesthetic decision, or most often a combination of the two. Similarly, hearing a Nina Simone sample can be both a pedagogic and a sensual experience for the listener; as a Signifyin(g) symbol, the hip hop sample carries only the meaning that a listener ascribes to it.8 However the manner in which these artists sample Simone’s work as well as the nature of the lyrics that accompany their beats can affect the extent to which her critical social theory remains intact. The hip hop artists that sample Simone’s work are mobilizing her tradition of social protest and self-definition to varying degrees. By retaining Simone’s voice in ways more faithful to her original recordings, these artists also retain her figurative articulation of socially active self-definition against the constraining matrix of domination. And when they silence or distort Simone’s voice very drastically, they are oftentimes also eschewing her social theory in favor of embodying and propagating the very controlling images that Simone spoke and acted against. The proliferation of these images in hip hop music begs important questions about who has the power to promote them and why. While it would be convenient to type these diverse artists as either “conscious” or “commercial” rappers who work against or for the matrix of domination, the complexities and fluidities of their work and speech preclude this type of neat typology. Individual artists move fluidly between the sub-genres of “conscious”9 or “mainstream” rap, often in the same composition, and by doing so explode essentialist notions of two- dimensional hip hop voices. We begin our discussion of domestic surveillance in the same way that domestic surveillance originally came to be in American society—from slavery—the original lists of human cargo, plantation inventories and diaries that were used by masters to govern slaves.Fugitivity is a challenge to that power matrix—disciplinary power operates through the compulsory visibility of targets—the aff is a challenge to the framework of wanted posters and slave patrols that evolved into modern policing and the domestic surveillance apparatusBrowne 2012 – PhD in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education (Simone; “Race and Surveillance” “Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies”; Google Book; https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=F8nhCfrUamEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA72&dq=race+and+surveillance+Simone+browne&ots=y_cvDcnYS0&sig=ZmhtR3WJI2mp_clVI6qwScZDZwQ#v=onepage&q=race%20and%20surveillance%20Simone%20browne&f=false; 7/5/15 || NDW) According to Christian Parenti, the history of surveillance in America can be traced to the "simple accounts" of slave owners. Of course, the accounting practices of transatlantic slavery were also present outside of the Americas. These simple accounts included slave vessel manifests listing human cargo, plantation inventories, diaries which contained observations about plantation life and instructions for governing slaves. One example involved the "General Rules" recorded by Charles Tait for his Columbus, Texas plantation: "4th in giving orders always do it in a mild tone, and try to leave the impression of the mind on the Negro that what you say is the result of reflection." The detailed cataloguing of slave life was a mechanism of disciplinary power, where disciplinary power, as Michel Foucault tells us, is "exercised through its invisibility," while imposing a "compulsory visibility" on its targets. Disciplinary power then operated on the enslaved as racialized surveillance that individuals were at once subjected to and that produced them as racial, and therefore enslave able, subjects. Such a racializing surveillance was apparent in the plantation security system, a system that relied on, as Parenti lays out, three "information technologies: the written slave pass, organized slave patrols, and wanted posters for runaways". Here, surveillance and literacy were closely articulated as slaves and indentured servants who could read and write could also forge passes and manumission papers or alter existing ones by replacing dates, names, and other unique identifiers, in this way functioning as antebellum hackers" able to "crack the code of the planters' security system". These forged passes were used for unauthorized travel outside of the plantation and were [produced by fugitives upon demand by slave patrollers, or "Pattie rollers", who were often non-property owning armed white men who policed slave mobilities. Sometimes producing a forged pass was not necessary. Any piece of printed text would do given that fugitive slaves were aware of many of these pattie rollers were illiterate, so they would hand over these "passes" when apprehended. This security system, then, relied on the "racially defined contours of (white) literacy and (black) illiteracy", a dichotomy that was not so readily upheld. Less easily counterfeited passes were later fashioned out of metal. The compulsory visibility of the racial subject can be seen in the circulation of newspaper advertisements and wanted posters for runaway slaves and truant servants. These texts were primarily aimed at a white public that was assumed to be literate and free, and who in consuming these texts, became a part of the aparatus of surveillance, and the eyes and ears of face-to-face watching and regulating. In detailing physical desacriptions, the surveillance technology of the fugitive slave advertisement made the already hypervisible racial subject legible as "out of place." For instance, a March 15 1783 advertisement in The Royal Gazzette offering a "Two Dollar Reward" for "a Mulatto, or Quadroon Girl, about 14 years of age, named Seth, but calls herself Sall," attests to the role of fugitive slave notices, and similarly, wanted posters, in upholding racial categorization. This notice went on to state: "sometimes says she is white and often paints her face to cover that deception." Seth's, or Sall's, duplicity is not limitefd to her use of an alias, as this notice tells us, but also to her racial ambiguity, witness her apparent choosing to self-identify or pass as white, rather than as "a Mulatto"(one black parent and one white parent) or a "Quadroon Girl" (one black grandparent) as per the racial nomenclature that arose out of slavery. Later such classifications as a form of population management were made official with the first US federal census in 1790. I will retun to the census as a technology that formalized racial categorization later. For now, the wanted notice for fugitive slaves as an information technology demonstrates that then as now race was a social construct that required constant policing and oversight. However, the format of the fugitive notice was repurposed in the form of handbills that functioned as a means of counter-surveillance. An 1851 handbill produced by abolitionists Theodore Parker attests to this as it cautioned "colored people of Bostonb" to steer clear of "watchmen and oilice officers" and to "keep a sharp look out for kidnappers, and have top eye open." "Top eye" here was a directive to look out and about with keen intent as police officeers were empowered to act as slave catchers under fugitive slave laws. Black spectatorship, along with the gazes of white abolitionists and other allies, functioned as a form of oppositional looking back at racializing surveillance. In her discussion of black spectatorship, the gaze and looking relaitons during slavery and the racial apartheid of Jim Crow in the southern United States, bell hooks tells us that black people often "cultivated the habit of casting the gaze fdownwards so as not to appear uppity To look directly was an assertion of subjectivity, equality". hook suggests that the boften violent ways in which blacks were denied the right to look back - think of the gruesome beating and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955, allegedly for looking at a white woman - "had produced in us an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze". Such politicized and oppositional looking were agential acts and can be seen, for example, in a June 14th 1783 runaway slave notice printed in the Royal Gazette for 16-year-old Samm, who is described in the notice as "five feet high" and "remarkable in turning up the whites of his eyes when spoken to." This notice records Sam's oppositional gaze, his lokking back, and shows us that resistance can be found even in the simple act of rolling one's eyes. Black looks have the power to trouble surveillance as a "Technology of Whiteness". Our performance is an act of poetics from a “legacy gone missing,” a strategy that both utilizes enclosure and run, that is here but is not here, that is there but is not there, visible but not visible.We begin with a radically different interpretation of freedom. Freedom from surveillance isn’t achieved when the NSA dissolves or the PATRIOT Act is reversed, nor is the fugitive simply imagined or demanded as a concept in the 1ac.Fugitivity and freedom exists in our use of language and it’s constant re-reading and re-use as a way of knowing the world. Freedom isn’t achieved or experienced when a plan is fiated—it is elusive, momentary, and a state of mind; it is discursive play rather than related to the location of the body or an abstract vision of social change. Such a “freedom” is utopian and fugitiveTremblay McGraw 10 – Robin Tremblay-McGraw @University of California, Santa Cruz “Enclosure and Run: The Fugitive Recyclopedia of Harryette Mullen’s Writing” MELUS Volume 35, No.2 Summer 2010. Pp 71-94 (Article) Oxford University Press [E.Smith] Harryette Mullen has published five books of original poetry—Tree Tall Woman (1981), Trimmings (1991), (1992), Muse & Drudge (1995), and Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002). Additionally, she has published two books which reissue her earlier works: Blues Baby: Early Poems (2002), which reprints Tree Tall Woman and also includes a previously unpublished collection; and Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge (2006). Mullen self-consciously inherits and intervenes in what Kathy Lou Schultz calls the “legacy gone missing” of “avant-garde practice by African-American women poets” (n. pag.). Mullen is actively engaged in recovering this legacy through her creative, scholarly, and editorial work.1 Poised in the dialectic of what I call “enclosure” (identity, history, and the archive, but also, racism, exclusion, and limitation) and “run” (mobility, flight, escape, critique, ongoing poesis, and revision), Mullen’s work plies the tensions between these disparate but mutually dependent poles. From the negotiation of this tension, Mullen produces a formal strategy predicated on the communal participation of others and distinctive among innovative poets—the recyclopedia. Mullen’s writing creates texts that remain open to ambiguity, difficulty, and difference. Her writing engages in political and social criticism with particular attention to race, gender, and the discourse of the commodity, while it delights in the pleasures of an infinite linguistic jouissance. Many of the critics who have written about Mullen’s work, including Elisabeth A. Frost, Juliana Spahr, Allison Cummings, and Deborah Mix, foreground its complex “mixtery” of disparate sources and infl uences, illustrating its rich and critical interrogation and reframing of literary history. Importantly, each critic also emphasizes Mullen’s attention to communal reading practices and several situate Mullen’s work as a negotiation between multiple discourses and infl uences, including Black Arts, Steinian modernism, and Language writing. Mix locates Mullen’s work in Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T in relation to Gertrude Stein but demonstrates how Mullen’s “subversion of convention . . . is both more complicated [than Stein’s] (in its inclusion of race in the welter of discourses of femininity and sexuality) and more communitarian (in its recognition of the individuals tangled in these linguistic webs” (71). Frost demonstrates Mullen’s rare (“among recent avant-garde poets”) revamping of the lyric and argues 72 that Mullen “constructs lyric otherwise—as an experiment in collective reading and an assertion of the complexities of community, language, and poetic voice” (466). While Spahr asserts that “what has interested me about Mullen’s work has been her attention to reading, an attention that is rooted in the intersection between language writing’s pursuit of wild reading and autonomy- and identity-centered poetry’s concerns with community building and alliance” (115), Cummings points out that “Mullen’s work then has garnered critical adulation not only because it works to synthesize disparate traditions, but because it reflects on that synthesis explicitly” (24). Surveying Mullen’s body of work as a whole and elaborating on Cummings’s assertion that Mullen self-consciously refl ects her work’s synthesis of multiple discourses, I contend in addition that Mullen’s writing is characterized by a productive tension between “enclosure” and “run,” between an archive of cultural, linguistic, and historical references, images, and information and the fugitivity that is both a thematics and a formal strategy. Her archive manifests in the form of the palimpsest, or, to use a fi gure that Mullen herself foregrounds, her archive is a recyclopedia. She takes debased, erased, and forgotten histories and found discourses and runs with and recycles them; she invites the reader to participate in this educative process of conservation and production, enclosure and fugitive run. Her work articulates a need for a more equitable ecology, one of acknowledgment and memory, conservation and reuse; she and we as readers are caught up in her recyclopedia, an ongoing poetics of reuse that benefits from the multiple perspectives of a heterogeneous community. The concept of the fugitive in Mullen’s work is connected equally to the history of the United States, the global slave trade, historical strategies of escape for enslaved blacks, and formal methods for escaping and reinventing genre and poetic method. Furthermore, the fugitive is both critical and generative and intimately linked to Mullen’s concept of the recyclopedia. Mullen’s formal strategies explicitly reference the history of the fugitive slave laws. In an interview with Cynthia Hogue, Mullen delineates the connection of the fugitive to her own work: I wanted the poem to have that quality of quick movement from one thing to another, from one subject or thought to another, from one mood or emotion to another. Partly because I wanted things to be in flux, a state of flux, a state of change. If you stand still too long, they will put chains on you, so you want to keep moving. This is one of the things that is most fascinating to me about the slave narratives I was studying while I was writing my dissertation. The true freedom in the slave narrative is at the point of deciding to escape and the journey north . . . the freedom that people experience is actually when they are on the road, in fl ight. (par. 25)\ Mullen links the structure of her poetry to the fl ight of the fugitive slave and then connects these movements of fugitivity with freedom. Interestingly, Mullen simultaneously problematizes the effi cacy of such movement and the resultant freedom gained when she further locates the moment of “true freedom . . . at the point of [the slave’s] deciding to escape and . . . journey.” This quote suggests that freedom is elusive, momentary, and a state of mind; it is discursive rather than related to the location of the body. Such a freedom is utopian and fugitive. The diffi culties of fl ight and the frequency of slaves being returned to owners as mandated by the Fugitive Slave Act made the journey north dangerous, exhausting, and subject to failure. Furthermore, in the literature of passing Mullen surveys in her article “Optic White: Blackness and the Production of Whiteness,” which explores how whites repress and suppress miscegenation and argues that the racial category of white is predicated on the black, she notes that in texts such as Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, “Death is better than slavery.” This is a “recurring refrain in Jacobs’s and other slave narratives, [that] acquires an ironic signifi cance when Benjamin [Jacobs’s lightskinned uncle] dies as a slave, vanishing into the white race in his third and fi nal escape” (82). For some, freedom means leaving one’s family and community, effectively dying in order to take up a new life as a free person or as a black who passes for white. Historically, flight is a means of escape, but not an unproblematic or uncomplicated means. Flight and travel (voluntary or not) undertaken by slaves, refugees, exiles, or nomads does not always erase histories but rather sometimes produces a palimpsestic and productive layering. In her doctoral dissertation, Mullen writes about Olaudah Equiano, the son of an African king who was taken into slavery and wrote from England in the eighteenth century. Discussing how “captivity disrupts his life, so that this African child fails to be ritually initiated [via scarifi cation] as an adult member of his tribe,” Mullen notes that in Equiano’s own discursive production: the displaced African is no blank page, as his reconstruction of early memories goes to show. He is more like a palimpsest, or like the protean “form of this Narrative.” . . . In the pages of Equiano’s prolifi c narrative, the black body retains its relation to a place of origin, but never acquires a fi xed signifi cation; instead layers of meaning accumulate as the character of the narrator evolves through a series of travels and adventures. (“Gender” 59) According to Mullen, for Equiano “retrospectively this disruption of cultural continuity is figured as a divine providence that intervenes to open up a new identity and destiny—a destiny constructed out of the individual’s unique interaction with chance and continually changing environments— rather than a predetermined fate or fi xed identity” (60). For some individuals fl ight and “cultural disruption” will enable strategic redefi nitions or recycling and make possible an identity open to change and resignifi cation; flight can create a kind of open archive always sedimented and palimpsestic so that past traces are not erased but available and recontextualized, refi gured and thus open to the future. Individuals and texts constructed out of fugitive fl ight from the law or those that travel across multiple cultural communities constitute the “recyclopedias” of disparate experiences, ideologies, and discourses. In the recyclopedia, fugitive fl ight rewrites identity by enabling a return to and reappropriation of the past. The neologism recyclopedia in the title of Mullen’s collection of three of her previous books is a combination of recycle and encyclopedia. Recycle references reuse, suggesting “to use again in the original form,” and the taking of intractable “used” or “waste” material and making it suitable for something new. Pedia recalls encyclopedia and its Greek root, paideia, meaning education. Mullen’s neologism clearly articulates a project that is both process and product. It entails a cyclical reuse of given materials and a process that takes dirty, contaminated, and worthless “waste” materials and turns them into something newly usable. Mullen’s recyclopedia suggests that the continual reuse of materials, even those that construct blacks as dirty, contaminated, and worthless, can serve to identify an original “use” (the racist construction of blacks as waste, for example); her writing enables the critical recycling of problematic materials to produce something new, something with different or oppositional value for writer, reader, history, and the future. Mullen’s recyclopedia constructs fugitive movement as a means of escape from arrest and as a productive process of remembering and rewriting. Mullen includes in her recyclopedia many diverse materials, yet she is particularly attentive to bringing to the surface the unarticulated, marginalized, nearly lost, and invisible as well as the “used” or “waste” material. Mullen’s recyclopedia enables the sort of activity described by David Scott that opens up “vast possibilities not just of memory but of countermemory; the moral idiom and semiotic registers of remembering against the grain of the history of New World black deracination, subjection, and exclusion” (vi). Such a process entails both identifying and preserving histories and experiences elided and prohibited from official discourses and simultaneously exposing such discourses’ bad faith. Rather than placing them under lock and key in order to solidify, arrest, and exclude racist and sexist discourses, Mullen remakes the encyclopedia—the discourse and its attendant pedagogies—through her recycling of its alphabets, grammars, metaphors, and other tropes. In the process, these discursive tigations reveal the often unmarked and unnamed structurings of various internecine ideologies. 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