Race Census Aff – mags compiled by Lenny Brahin Jaden Lessnick Jillian Gordners Brian Roche 1AC
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- The census is multiculturalism – we break that down
At: linksAt: polyculturalism linksNot OUR polyculturalismSchwarz 2007 (Anja, and West-Pavlov, Russel, eds. At the Interface/Probing the Boundaries, Volume 39 : Polyculturalism and Discourse. Amsterdam, NLD: Editions Rodopi, 2007. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 28 June 2015, LB) We do not intend to fill ‘polyculturalism’ with any such meanings. Indeed, we wished to preserve a certain degree of ‘play’ in the term chosen. At the same time however, we did not coin it with the intention of ‘stepping out of the ring’, in the ingenuous belief that there is some ‘objective’ site of academic discourse which would not be tainted by the corrosive influence of ‘power-knowledge’. And, in fact, a simple keyword search in the internet demonstrated this impossibility in a telling manner. The search revealed that members of a neo-conservative USAmerican internet forum had indeed been using the term for some time and were debating its viability as a discursive tool in countering what they perceived to be a left-wing multiculturalist agenda (in the US, similarly to Germany, multiculturalism has never been sanctioned through government policy on the federal level, thus making the term more vulnerable to such attacks than in the Australian context). Conversely, the term ‘policulturalism’ has been employed by scholars working within the South African post-Apartheid context to refer to a field of discursive debate in which a myriad of new histories have been released into the public domain. The demise of pre-1994 censorship has allowed the emergence of many once-repressed forms and genres of histories, all too often reified and commodified under the neo-liberalism which swiftly followed in the wake of political liberalization. ‘The prefix marks two things: plurality and its politicization.’ 3 A ‘policultural’ field of disparate discourses would be characterized neither by the reduction of difference to trademarking in a discursive realm in which heritage and ethnicity are immediately recuperated by a commodifying market, nor to the artificial foreclosure or fallacious resolution of dissonance through a rhetoric of legal settlement evinced, for instance, in the Truth and Reconciliation Committee. ‘Policulturalism’ in this context indexes a stubbornly uncompromising and open-ended engagement between the many ethnic fractions and their irreducibly specific histories: “A form of cultural dissensus and alterity”, to appropriate Bhabha’s formulation, “where non-consensual terms of affiliation may be established on the grounds of historical trauma”. 4 It refers to a debate which resists the erasure of discursive difference precisely because this is the very factor that furnishes the grounds for genuine discursive interaction. 5 Precisely this is the manner in which we have intended in our choice of such a neologism. Our employment of the term ‘polyculturalism’ for this publication, instead of attempting to ascribe to it a specific meaning, is therefore intended to destabilise any notions of a seemingly ‘given’ meaning. Rather, our usage aims to re-open a space in which the workings of discourse, both as archive or practice, and as intervention, can be considered in greater depth. The inter-cultural perspective shared by all essays in this volume contributes to this goal: whereas the majority of discourse analytical work addresses the diversity of speaking positions, as well as the arbitrariness of ascribed meanings, within a historical framework delimited by national boundaries, the texts collected here transgress this perspective in working comparatively between Australia and Germany. While not eschewing the historical dimension championed by Foucault and others, they show that the aspirations of discourse analytical work can equally be achieved by comparing similar discursive fields in different countries. Multiculturalism linksThey’re very different – polyculturalism focuses on similarities not differencesPrashad 2011 (Vijay. Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001, annotation by Kirsten Rokke (Theories of Media, Winter 2004), LB) This highly opinionated history highlights the interactions of the Others, specifically Asian and Black Others. Prashad’s political or theoretical goals in drawing out some neglected histories is to promote his idea of polyculturalism. He sets polyculturalism in opposition to what he considers to be the two dominant American attitudes toward race: color blindness and multiculturalism. He defines the color blind attitude to be the logic motivating opposition to affirmative action, that people should be evaluated based on merit irrespective of ethnicity. He argues that this is shortsighted because it doesn’t take into account the more systematic forces in place which benefit certain groups more than others. He specifically draws attention to the way that Asian Americans are positioned as the model minority and used to prove the laziness of others. Multiculturalism is problematic for him as well because it emphasizes the differences between cultures in a way that reifies them as separate and static. Institutions that support multiculturalism try to "manage the problem of diversity rather than how to undermine the structures that engender the illusion of absolute difference and then the zoological maintenance of culture out of fear of survival (for primordialists and indegenistas) or out of fear of contamination (for racist cultural chauvinists)" (63). His project is to present a history of polyculturalism which reveals the blending of cultural practices and values across ethnic boundaries; this strategy works to "(uncouple) the notions of origins and authenticity from that of culture" (65). The census is multiculturalism – we break that downMezey, 3 – Professor of Law at Georgetown University (Naomi, “Erasure and Recognition: The Census, Race and the National Imagination”, 97 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1701-1768 (2003) Northwestern University Law Review, 2003)//jml There exists a very real dilemma of how to best think and speak about race when we do not know what it is, but we know it matters and wish it did not. One of the failings of the debate over the multiracial category is that, while it touches the heart of this dilemma, the discourse of the debate has mostly sidestepped this issue and become mired in its own problems of ra- cial essentialism. Rodriguez's congressional testimony on behalf of La Raza is emblematic. His anxiety that a multiracial category might be used by those who want to end all race categories led him to repeatedly dismiss the multiracial category as "a heterogeneous identifier that is not an actual race category."32' The implication is that the race categories designated by the census are real, in that they not only correspond to something we might call "actual races," but also that those races are homogeneous. Michael Omi has argued convincingly that the census classifications, as defined in Directive 15, are both inconsistent and heterogeneous. As he points out, only one of the categories is specifically defined by reference to race (black), another category is based on cultural designators (Hispanic), and another on community affiliation (American Indian).322 Nor are the groups stable or homogeneous; Omi cites as an example the current pan-ethnic identity of Asian American that grew out of the alliances forged by numer- ous and distinct Asian ethnic groups.323 Regardless of whether we think Rodriguez is right, his testimony makes clear that the argument against a multiracial category on the grounds that it is not a real race risks falling into the trap of discredited scientific accounts of race and racial essentialism. However, john powell and Michael Omi, among others,324 have shown how the arguments advanced on behalf of multiracial advocates also tend to rest on biological theories of race and essentialism. As Omi puts it, "The very terms 'mixed race' or 'multiracial' imply the existence of 'pure' and distinct races. 325 powell goes further in suggesting that a multiracial cate- gory ends up undermining its own claim to distinctiveness because virtually all Americans are of mixed race, and to the extent multiracial proponents reject that proposition they are forced back toward the position of biologi- cally recognizable races.326 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 0.87 Mb. Share with your friends:
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