Fugitivity Affirmative—beffjr Note
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- DS Grew from Slavery
Build Your Own 1acEpistemologyVoting aff affirms the creation of a an entire body of knowledge that isn’t included in their episteme—it’s a pre-requisite to affirming any alternative existence that can strive towards freedomDillon 13 assistant professor of Queer Studies, holds a B.A. from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. in American Studies with a minor in Critical Feminist and Sexuality Studies from the University of Minnesota. (Stephen, “Fugitive Life: Race, Gender, and the Rise of the Neoliberal-Carceral State “,A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA , May 2013 //SRSL) The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the emergence of two new voices within national debates about racism, imperialism, poverty, and civil rights—the prisoner and the fugitive. As more and more members of the 1960s liberation movements were imprisoned or went underground, a new body of knowledge emerged from both of these figures that negated national narratives of progress, equality, and justice. While Fugitive Life tells a story about post-civil rights feminist, queer, and anti-racist activism, it focuses on these two figures and two corresponding spaces: the prison and the underground. In response to police repression in the form of incarceration, sabotage, and assassination, and in order to deploy illegal tactics, hundreds of activists in the 1970s left behind families, friends, jobs, and their identities in order to disappear into a vast network of safe houses, under-the-table jobs, and transportation networks. In fact, before she was imprisoned, Davis herself spent many months underground in order to hide from the FBI. While there has been a resurgence of interest in many of these groups (prompted by and reflected in the anxiety about Obama’s connections to Weather Underground member Bill Ayers during the 2008 presidential election), their significance to the post-civil rights landscape—as structured by the prison and neoliberalism—has only begun to be explored. The books of imprisoned authors like Eldridge Cleaver, George Jackson, and Malcolm X (which sold hundreds of thousands of copies) exposed something about the United States that only they could know. In the original introduction to Jackson’s Soledad Brother, Jean Genet wrote that Jackson’s prison writing exposed “the miracle of truth itself, the naked truth revealed.”20 For Genet and many readers of this literature, the prisoner had access to a unique formation of knowledge which led to alternative ways of seeing and knowing the world. Indeed, scholars like Dylan Rodríguez, Michael-Hames Garcia, and Joy James have argued that the knowledge produced by the prisoner exposes a truth about the United States that cannot be accessed from elsewhere.21 The prisoner could name what others could not even see. At the same time, thousands of political fugitives wrote devastating critiques of the United States as they bombed and robbed their way to what they hoped would be a better world. Underground organizations like the Weather Underground, Black Liberation Army, and George Jackson Brigade did more than attack symbols of state violence; they also wrote poetry, stories, memoirs, communiqués, magazines, and made films. These groups understood culture as foundational to the production and survival of alternatives to things as they were. In this way, culture became a site for the emergence of alternative forms of knowledge. DS Grew from SlaveryAmerican surveillance grew from slavery—the original lists of human cargo, plantation inventories and diaries were used by masters to govern slaves. Disciplinary power operated through the compulsory visibility of targets, and fugitives became targets of additional layers of surveillance like wanted posters and slave patrols that evolved into modern policing and oversightBrowne 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 infoprmation 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". Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 1.17 Mb. Share with your friends:
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