Fugitivity Affirmative—beffjr Note

Nicolas Williams from Henderson

Riley Franklin from Dulles

Ragul Manoharan from Little Rock Central

Ross Fitzpatrick from Barstow

Simone Schwartz-Lombard from Notre Dame

Tamara Morrison from U Prep

**additional thanks to DJ Williams and Peyton Woods from Little Rock Central for their contributions as well, all the more impressive given that this was work they added on top of their work in their own lab.

1acs

1ac—Janelle Monae

~Janelle Monae - Cold War

So you think I'm alone?

But being alone's the only way to be

When you step outside

You spend life fighting for your sanity
This is a cold war

You better know what you're fighting for

This is a cold war

Do you know what you're fighting for?

Below the ground's the only place to be

Cause in this life

You spend time running from depravity

Do you know what you're fighting for?

This is a cold war

You better know what you're fighting for

This is a cold war

You better know what you're fighting for

This is a cold war

Do you know what you're fighting for?

May all evil stumble as it flies in the world

All the tribes comes and the mighty will crumble

We must brave this night and have faith in love

I was made to believe there's something wrong with me

And it hurts my heart

Lord have mercy, ain't it plain to see?

You better know what you're fighting for

This is a cold war

Do you know what you're fighting for?

Do you, do you... do you?

Don't you cry when I say goodbye

With her performance as a black women and her reference to the cold war Janelle creates a duality of everywhere-ness and concrete experience

Thus affirm the 1ac as a performance to counter-gaze the state.

Freedom isn’t fiat; 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.

Monae’s narrative creates a space that fosters different methods of state deconstruction.

REDMOND, 11 (Shana L. is Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC. She received her combined Ph.D. in African American Studies and American Studies from Yale University. Her research and teaching interests include the African Diaspora, Black political cultures, music and popular culture. "Marking the Margins: Janelle Monáe's 'Cold War' Landscape":“This Safer Space: Janelle Monae’s´ "Cold War"”, Post45 Conference, Roundtable/Panel, Refereed Paper, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland, OH, Post45, Spring 2011 )
Monae´s questions to us throughout the song are met with definitive statements as she narrates a story of dispossession and alienation. Her second verse, which argues, "If you want to be free / below the ground's the only place to be / 'cause in this life / you spend time running from depravity," details a space not of death ("below the ground") but of safety that is shared by a self-selected group who choose freedom over flight ("running from depravity"). It is an underground, a shelter, where political consciousness might best be fostered and utilized safe from the culture wars fought outside. Monae’ s spatial realignments signal a powerful departure from conventional narratives of black suffering; unlike much of the disaster and tourist photography of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which purports to display black reality without allowing the subject to speak, we are forced, through viewing her moving image, to brace ourselves for her next utterance as she looks us in the eye and uses her emotional intensity to displace our intentions for her body. Through this effort she becomes the subject through which the forces under consideration are elucidated. Raw emotion punctuates this possession; at the moment of revealing, "I was made to believe there's something wrong with me / And it hurts my heart," Monae´ s eyes well up with tears. She breaks character as the emotions escalate, missing the lines of her playback, and shaking her head and hands in acknowledgement of the emotions that originally inspired the song's composition and that are now replayed in the act of performance. This rupture dismisses the standard ventriloquism of music video lip synchronization in favor of vulnerability before a knowing audience, signaling her investment in using her own "Cold War" for new ends: it is no longer a contained project (war) or a historical object (music video) but it is, through her, an entire field of play and performative engagement that traverses period, ideology, and method. This radical act of self-exposure spurns the longstanding surveillance practices of the United States and offers an alternative to the subterfuge used by oppressed peoples.

Monae’s sound takes advantages of social movements and leave an opportunity for future one

REDMOND, 11 (Shana L. is Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC. She received her combined Ph.D. in African American Studies and American Studies from Yale University. Her research and teaching interests include the African Diaspora, Black political cultures, music and popular culture. "Marking the Margins: Janelle Monáe's 'Cold War' Landscape":“This Safer Space: Janelle Monae’s´ "Cold War"”, Post45 Conference, Roundtable/Panel, Refereed Paper, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland, OH, Post45, Spring 2011 )

Monae´ has developed, within a relatively short period of time,a sound/sight corpus of black feminist knowledges that take advantage of social movement methods—notably the use of her own experience as evidence—to inspire and instruct those around her. Her embodied protest challenges the popular black political cultures of the contemporary moment, which have been deftly disciplined by formal political structures like the Obama White House; in the process, these actors dismiss the rich heterogeneity of the black public sphere by conceding too much of their intellectual authority to those whose sociopolitical strategies long ago diverged from traditions of black struggle.¹⁴ Monae s challenge to those who have forgotten, lost, or ignored their own voice and agency, and her maintenance of black diasporic arts traditions in which "the cultural realm is always in play and already politically significant terrain," is a "fantastic" disruption to black political lethargy, and evidences an intelligent design rooted in black feminist constructions that wed body to mind and experience to history (Iton). It is within these methods and conjunctions that the future spaces of political possibility might be realized

This space allows black women to not only deconstruct the state, but also patriarchy in order to combat oppression with alternative forms of performance.

REDMOND, 11 (Shana L. is Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC. She received her combined Ph.D. in African American Studies and American Studies from Yale University. Her research and teaching interests include the African Diaspora, Black political cultures, music and popular culture. "Marking the Margins: Janelle Monáe's 'Cold War' Landscape":“This Safer Space: Janelle Monae’s´ "Cold War"”, Post45 Conference, Roundtable/Panel, Refereed Paper, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland, OH, Post45, Spring 2011 )

Monae´s performance refuses the acts of dissemblance that have long characterized black women's participation in the public sphere. Darlene Clark Hine argues that black women employed dissemblance throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a way to respond to rape, violence, and the threats thereof, thus "creat[ing] the appearance of openness and disclosure but actually shield[ing] the truth of their inner lives" (912). These refusals produced a "self-imposed invisibility" that allowed them to "accrue the psychic space and harness the resources needed to hold their own in the often one-sided and mismatched resistance struggle" (Hine 915). Mon´ae relies on invisibility in "Cold War," insisting that "Being alone's the only way to be / When you step outside / you spend life fighting for your sanity."7 Her words echo the sentiments of Mary Church Terrell, who early in the twentieth century announced to her constituency in the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs that "our peculiar status [as black women] in this country . . . seems to demand that we stand by ourselves" (Hine 917).Monae´s staging of interiority, however, is already undercut by her choice of ae' forum: it is not a platform from which she speaks only to other black women, but a music video that comprised both a sonic announcement to be replayed again and again, and a moving image that catalogs and exposes her for all time to anyone who would watch/listen. There is a dramatic tension here; while Mon´ acknowledges dissemblance as a strategy, she also forestalls its efficacy through that revelation, effectively lifting the veil of secrecy that allowed for black women's sociopolitical subterfuge.

This deconstruction allows us to question history as it affects present structures as well as promoting a free space that advocates for alternative discourse.

REDMOND, 11 (Shana L. is Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC. She received her combined Ph.D. in African American Studies and American Studies from Yale University. Her research and teaching interests include the African Diaspora, Black political cultures, music and popular culture. "Marking the Margins: Janelle Monáe's 'Cold War' Landscape":“This Safer Space: Janelle Monae’s´ "Cold War"”, Post45 Conference, Roundtable/Panel, Refereed Paper, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland, OH, Post45, Spring 2011 )

Monae´s performative unveiling sensitizes us to questions of truth as the layers of history, identity, and resistance collapse on one another. Yet her engagement with and demand for the rights of access and voice are consistent throughout. Her performance makes the space to critique how dissemblance may have "contributed to the development of an atmosphere inimical to realizing equal opportunity or a place of respect"; yet the method of exposure—performance—signals another intervention (Hine 915). The music video, which has offered a platform for display and critique since the 1970s, is used by Monae´ in "Cold War" as a confessional site, a shelter ae where the struggles of the ordinary black women described by Hine, and embodied by Monae´ might be discussed and responded to. Too often safe spaces are limited in their availability for the disenfranchised, yet Mon´ae is able, through various creative and organizing techniques, to construct a "Cold War" free speech zone—a task and location little known during the historical moment that the song references. Her "Cold War" imagination therefore creates an alternative reality that is recognizably different from those of her contemporaries within the shared "superpublic" described by Richard Iton, in which black bodies and performances are conspicuous in the visual cultures grown from hip hop and the Internet. Mon´ae s willingness to challenge history situates her as a spectral figure representing the unfinished work of the past, even as she leads a cohort in the present and envisions a future beyond her own critique.8

Fugitivity exists in our use of language and it’s constant re-reading and re-use. Such a “freedom” is utopian and fugitive

Tremblay 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), S*PeRM**K*T (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.

The knowledge here is specifically key. It allows experimental ways of change

Warren  and Fassett, 2004 [The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved Theatre Topics 14.2 (2004) 411-430John T. Warren is an assistant professor in the School of Communication Studies at Bowling Green State University, where he teaches courses in performance, culture, identity, and power. Deanna L. Fassett is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at San José State University, where she teaches courses in instructional communication and critical, feminist, and performative pedagogies //liam]

Boal's argument that performance activists and teachers should work against the mystification process, not the myth; work against the struggles, not the hero, reminds us that this sort of performance work is significant precisely because it attempts to destroy not the white person, but rather the illusions, trappings, and power games that make whiteness so powerful. It is the process of interactive performance that these kinds of workshops foreground that can allow a resistant white participant to engage in a critique of white power and privilege without lapsing into feelings of guilt or self-pity, which can too easily reduce con-versations of race and racism to individual actions without calling out the system that makes those actions possible. These kinds of performances allow the theories and engagements with critical race theory to move participants in ways that matter—through listening, understanding, and then recreating their qualities in ways that speak to them. This mode of embodiment moves theory through their bodies, effecting change in experiential ways.

The role of the ballot is to vote for the team that best creates a space of under-commons to deconstruct and overthrow anti-black structures of power

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