Tinsley negative at: Black Queerness

AT: PRISCILLA

Narratives Are Bad

Narratives in debate are bad and lack precision

Kelly McDonald is the Director of Forensics at Washington University and is co-authoring a book on Debate Watch ’96. Jeffery Jarman teaches at Elliott School of Communication at Wichita State University (Date accessed – 7/11/14 – C.M.) http://debate.uvm.edu/NFL/rostrumlib/cxmcdonald0198.pdf

Gass (1988) represents the strongest critique of the Application of a narrative paradigm in academic debate. Rejecting any paradigmatic solution to the problems within debate practice through narrative, Gass advances the expert model for argument construction and evaluation. He makes three basic arguments against the narrative paradigm. First, Gass says the narrative paradigm lacks the precision needed for academic debate. Grounding his argument in the differences between “pure” and “applied” theories, Gass contends that “pure theories” do not require precision because they attempt to “explain, understand, or interpret phenomena.”

Engaging in other’s narratives is a form of “artless confession” and only benefits the researcher

Sarah Lucia Hoagland is Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. She authored Lesbian Ethics. She was also co-editor of For Lesbians Only, an anthology of writing on the topic of Lesbian Separatism, and Re-reading the Canon: Feminist Interpretations of Mary Daly. (Date accessed – 7/11/14 – C.M.) http://www.cavehill.uwi.edu/fhe/histphil/chips/archives/2009/docs/hoagland2009.aspx

Using the narratives of slaves silences the slaves voice

Keizer, ‘4

Associate Professor, English School of Humanities, Associate Professor, African American Studies School of Humanities, Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1996, M.A., Stanford University, 1988, B.A., Princeton University, 1986. (Date accessed – 7/11/14 – C.M.) http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=UfB9Fmo_5PkC&oi=fnd&pg=PR11&dq=slave+static+identity&ots=N3RytRir7Y&sig=QlOQUf6pUW66GPOsq-mOBX3tyoA#v=onepage&q=narrative&f=false

Slave Narrative: Studies in the Social Logic of a Liberary Form (1999) was the first full-length study of a group of contemporary narratives referencing slavery. Rushdy defines “Neo-slave narratives” as “contemporary novels that assume form, adopt the conventions, and take on the first-person voice of the antebellum slave narrative” (Rushdy 3). He analyzes these contemporary versions of the first-person slave narrative in light of the social and cultural changes wrought by the Black Power and Black Arts Movements. In contrast to Bell and Rushdy, I refer to these works as “contemporary narratives of slavery” to cast a wider interpretive net than either of these critics do with their nearly identical neologisms. (Rushdy is, of course, borrowing and refurbishing Bell’s term.) The influence of the U.S. and Caribbean slavery upon contemporary black literature is much greater than Bell and Rushdy acknowledge. Though Bell’s scope of these works because of its focus on the movement from enslavement to freedom, the trajectory of the traditional slave narrative. Rushdy focuses even more narrowly on the influence of the antebellum slave narrative, analyzing only those contemporary novels that clearly and explicitly reference nineteenth-century, first-person, literate slave testimony. Though a number of writers are directly addressing the slave narrative, others simply take the form for granted as a precursor to a twentieth-century discourse on slavery. Contemporary writers’ views of slavery are certainly informed by slave narratives and their speaking silences, yet many writers move so far beyond the traditional narratives that their works are not bound that frame of reference. It is striking, for example, how few contemporary narratives of slavery are written in the first person.

AFFIRMATION BAD

Affirmation Bad – 1NC

The politics of affirmation produce a weak ontology that lacks the political moment necessary to produce a productive act. The aff divests the ability of politics to be oppositional. Our alternative is to embrace radical negativity and oppositional politics

Dean 2005 Jodi A politics of avoidance: the limits of weak ontology http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/files/butler_and_ontology.doc

Some political theorists argue that the proper response to this fundamentalism is generosity.1 They elaborate ontologies and ethics that eschew fundamentals and urge an awareness of the contestability of one’s own fundaments or a responsiveness to the limits and vulnerabilities that necessarily condition the contexts in which we give an account of ourselves. I consider here work by Stephen White and Judith Butler. White offers the notion of a weak ontology as a contextually attuned and politically minded response to this moment of fundamentalist vitality.2 I argue that it is the wrong response, one that turns to acceptance and affirmation at a juncture when the future of hopes for equality, democracy, and a sustainable, common being-together demand a more critical, political, response. Critical, as opposed to affirmative, theory is necessary today. White’s approach, one that finds common ground among disparate thinkers, divests critical theories of their oppositional political edge. He makes them congenial to current power relations at a moment when they need to be sharpened and wielded as critically and antagonistically as possible. Butler, one of the thinkers White tames and assimilates, can be read as responding to White’s project for weak ontology. I argue that her Spinoza lectures do this and more as they develop a notion of ethical accountability that highlights the necessity of critique. But even as Butler’s critical ethics improves upon White’s ontology, in these times of fundamentalist vigor, they remain too passive, too acquiescent and compliant. They offer critique, yet avoid the risky political work of condemnation and division, of specifically and decisively rejecting those religious, nationalist, militarist, and market fundamentalisms that are today actively rewriting the very terms of personhood, the very possibility of sustainable living, to benefit the wealthy, privileged few while the majority are rendered criminal, illegal, diseased, disposable.
Their ethos of generosity results in global war and destruction via the war on terrorism –only the alternative can solve
Jodi Dean, assc. Prof of political theory at Hobart and Williams smith 2007

1. 
   Why Žižek for Political Theory? , http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/18/41, IJŽS Vol 1, No 1
   
2. 
   Slavoj Žižek’s work is indispensable to any effort to break out of the present political impasse, an impasse in which not only English speaking and European countries are caught but which threatens the entire world (not least because of the English speaking countries’ global war on/of terror). Žižek’s version of dialectical materialism (a combination of Hegel, Marx, and Lacan) enables political theorists to think better about passionate attachments to domination and anxiety in the face of freedom. I begin by approaching this impasse as a barrier to thought, particularly Left thought as it remains unable to think through or out of the current hegemony.
   

Contemporary Left theorists worry about dogmatism and fundamentalism. That is, they see fundamentalism as the primary political problem today. In response, some emphasize diversity and tolerance. They may approach diversity from the perspective of democratic debate, presenting a conception of politics premised on ideals of participation, inclusion, equality, and mutual respect. Others emphasize the multiplicity of ways of being in the world and the importance of an ethos of generosity towards those ways that may differ, radically, from our own.

None provides an adequate response to right wing fundamentalists, nationalist ideologues, and neoliberal capitalist globalizers. This motley crew of bad guys eschews debate and respect. It throws generosity back up against the generous, forever accusing them of not being respectful and generous enough. Its capitalist wing finds ever more creative and ingenious ways to profit. Diversity becomes multiculturalism™: parents can buy colorful multilingual dolls; producers can make action films with global appeal; educators can buy multicultural teaching kits designed to insure that their students are well-prepared to compete in a global economy. Likewise, democratic debate is easily capitalized: citizens seeking information are ready eyeballs for advertisers; politicians can champion the role of the Internet in keeping their constituencies connected, while telecoms, ISPs, chip, hardware, and software providers wisely nod their heads and pocket their vastly increased revenues. Against, this motley crew, generosity and tolerance won’t work. More precisely, as long as left intellectuals reject anything that smacks of dogmatism, as long as we reject a politics of conviction, as long as we refuse to draw a line in the sand and say enough is enough, the right will continue its exploitation and repression of most of the world’s peoples. The problem of Left political thought, then, is trying to theorize a politics that includes everything and everyone. But this isn’t politics. Politics involves division, saying “yes” to some options and “no” to others. A willingness to take responsibility for the divisions inseparable from politics seems to have been lost, or relegated to small, local, struggles. Particularly odd in radical pluralists’ and deliberative democrats’ focus on fundamentalism is its alliance with the central tenets of the bad guys themselves. Neoconservatives and neoliberals agree that fundamentalism is the most important political problem. Fundamentalism, they chorus, opposes the unfolding of freedom in the world.

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