Fugitivity Affirmative—beffjr Note
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- Rap and hip hop are now invisible due to public dismissal of mainstream songs with phrases like “hip hop is dead”.
1ac—Killer MikeKiller Mike – Reaganhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lIqNjC1RKU 1:49 – 3:20 The end of the Reagan Era, I'm like number twelver Old enough to understand the shit'll change forever They declared the war on drugs like a war on terror But it really did was let the police terrorize whoever But mostly black boys, but they would call us "niggers" And lay us on our belly, while they fingers on they triggers They boots was on our head, they dogs was on our crotches And they would beat us up if we had diamonds on our watches And they would take our drugs and money, as they pick our pockets I guess that that's the privilege of policing for some profit But thanks to Reaganomics, prisons turned to profits Cause free labor is the cornerstone of US economics Cause slavery was abolished, unless you are in prison You think I am bullshitting, then read the 13th Amendment Involuntary servitude and slavery it prohibits That's why they giving drug offenders time in double digits Ronald Reagan was an actor, not at all a factor Just an employee of the country's real masters Just like the Bushes, Clinton and Obama Just another talking head telling lies on teleprompters If you don't believe the theory, then argue with this logic Why did Reagan and Obama both go after Qaddafi We invaded sovereign soil, going after oil Taking countries is a hobby paid for by the oil lobby Same as in Iraq, and Afghanistan And Ahmadinejad say they coming for Iran They only love the rich, and how they loathe the poor If I say any more they might be at my door Who the * is that staring in my window Doing that surveillance on Mister Michael Render I'm dropping off the grid before they pump the lead I leave you with four words: I'm glad Reagan dead The problem of surveillance is bigger than the anecdote Killer Mike relates. The real questions are: Who does the surveilling, who is the target of that surveillance, why does that surveillance exist and how can it be curtailed?American 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 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 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. 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), 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. When slaves sang songs like “follow the drinking gourd” they were singing the steps and guides for fugitive slaves to navigate the underground railroad and escape the plantation. They could sing these songs publicly because their masters interpreted it as the delightful tone of slaves singing in the fields. It was at once visible but not visible, there but not there.Rap and hip hop are now invisible due to public dismissal of mainstream songs with phrases like “hip hop is dead”.This allows revolutionary rappers like Killer Mike to masquerade their songs as meaningless drivel. Vote Aff to speak out against social and institutional racism and construct an alternative community through poetic fugitivity.Mesing 14 PhD (Dave Mesing – PhD in philosophy from Villanova University. “From R.A.P. Music to Run the Jewels: Killer Mike and the Homonymity of the Idea” - March 9, 2014. Wordpress. Accessed 7/7/15. https://itself.wordpress.com/2014/03/09/from-r-a-p-music-to-run-the-jewels-killer-mike-and-the-homonymity-of-th-idea/) dortiz However, Killer Mike and El-P, as Run the Jewels, conduct a conceptualization of what Run the Jewels means as well, and it’s a conceptualization that brings together the contrasting elements from Killer Mike’s R.A.P. Music in a perfect harmony. Let me explicitly state here that I am not suggesting that El-P’s production or collaboration somehow completes Killer Mike’s work, which would be a kind of racist white savior reading of what’s going on. I think the same type of analysis could be done from another angle, viewing El-P’s progression into Run the Jewels, but I’m more familiar with Killer Mike’s solo work, and so I’ve chosen it. The important thing for me here is that Run the Jewels comes to be a communally joyful expression of militant resistance to the status quo. This can be seen in two movements, first in the song “Get It,” and second in the final track, “A Christmas Fucking Miracle.” Towards the end of “Get It,” both emcees set out blunt statements about who they are: [Verse 3: El-P] My name is Jamie Meline I’m not chasing the green, I’m taking it Bosses don’t change a thing in the name of seemingly making it Servants’ll kiss the ring of whoever they think is paying ’em You don’t deserve the spit that they hurdled up in your face and shit [Verse 4: Killer Mike] My name is Michael Render And we are the new Avengers We’re here to tell you that all your false idols are just pretenders They’re corporation slaves indentured to all the lenders So even if you got seven figures, you still a n**** This song radicalizes the opposition to most contemporary rap music that seethes through the album. It not only declares war on unnamed other figures in mainstream music, but it does so for the sake of resisting the contemporary powers that be. It is in this sense that we should understand Killer Mike’s proclamation that Run the Jewels are the new Avengers. More than the all-out assault on other rappers that pervades the album, this declaration boldly takes the mantle of truth and justice upon Run the Jewels, as those fans of the Marvel Comic will know. In what sense are Run the Jewels the defenders of truth and justice? Quite simply, to the extent that they are successful in politicizing and militarizing a negation of the ruling powers in favor of the construction of an alternative community. Killer Mike makes the former most clear with the following line on “Twin Hype”: “I’m no respecter of person, I’m no respecter of rules / I catch the Prince of England slipping, he goin’ to run me the jewels.” The sense in which the two are successfully brought together is most clear on the final track, whose expression I will leave to Killer Mike and El-P: Towards the conclusion of his chapter on homonyms, Agamben writes, “while the network of concepts continually introduces synonymous relations, the idea is that which intervenes every time to shatter the pretense of absoluteness in these relations, showing their inconsistency.” (76) If Killer Mike’s R.A.P. Music introduces a set of synonyms, on Run the Jewels self-titled album, these synonyms become homonymous with respect to the idea Run the Jewels. At the outset of The Coming Community, Agamben also tells us of the importance of love for the coming politics: “the movement that Plato describes as erotic anamnesis is the movement that transports the object not toward another thing or another place, but towards its own taking-place–toward the Idea.” (2) Run the Jewels, insofar as it successfully brings together a militant refusal to give in or bow a knee to the powers that be with a weaponization of love for the creation of alternative community, is such an Idea, and perhaps, an exemplar of the coming community. 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. 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