Lauryn Hill- ‘i get Out’ I get out, I get out of all your boxes
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- The black body is the Hei Ren under China
1ACLauryn Hill- ‘I Get Out’ I get out, I get out of all your boxes I get out, you can't hold me in these chains I'll get out Father free me from this bondage Knowin' my condition Is the reason I must change Your stinkin' resolution Is no type of solution Preventin' me from freedom Maintainin' your pollution I won't support your lie no more I won't even try no more If I have to die, oh Lord That's how I choose to live I won't be compromised no more I can't be victimised no more I just don't sympathize no more Cause now I understand For Spillers, black studies must become an object of knowledge by recognizing its own image in the mode of production of knowledge. That is, rather than assuming that black studies represents an already delineated field of objects, we must pay attention to the ways in which it contributes to the creation of its own objects of knowledge.Within the paradoxical stance of the black within this debate space and society, the black feministic womyn’s flesh is necessary to utilize in an insurgence of blackness Spillers 87 (Hortense is an American literary critic, Black Feminist scholar and the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor at Vanderbilt University.) Louisiana's and South Carolina's written codes is a paradigm tor praxis in those instances where a written text is missing. In that case, the "chattel principle has ... been affirmed and maintained by the courts, and involved in legislative acts" (Goodell 251. In Maryland, a legislative enactment of 1798 shows so forceful a synonymity of motives be- tween branches of comparable governance that a line between "judicial" and "legislative" functions is useless to draw: "In case the personal property of a ward shall consist of specific articles, such as slaves, working beasts, animals Of any kind, stock, furniture, plates, books, and so forth, the Court if it shall deem it advantageous to the ward, may at any time, pass an order for the sale thereof" 1561. This inanimate and corporate ownership — the voting district of a ward — is here spoken for, or might be, as a single slave-holding male in determinations concerning property. The eye pauses, however, not so much at the provisions of this enactment as at the details of its delineation. Everywhere in the descriptive document, we are stunned by the simultaneity of disparate items in a grammatical series: "Slave" appears in the same context with beasts of burden, all and any animal(s), various livestock, and a virtually endless profusion of domestic content from the culinary item to the book. Unlike the taxonomy of Borges's "Certain Chinese encyclopedia," whose contemplation opens Foucault's Order of Things, these items from a certain American encyclopedia do not sustain discrete and localized "powers of contagion," nor has the ground of their concatenation been desiccated beneath them. That imposed uniformity comprises the shock, that somehow this mix of named things, live and inanimate, collapsed by contiguity to the same text of "realism," carries a disturbingly prominent item of misplacement. To that extent, the project of liberation for African-Americans has found urgency in two passionate motivations that are twinned — 1) to break apart, to rupture violently the laws of American behavior that make such syntax possible; 2) to introduce a new semantic field/fold more appropriate to his/her own historic movement. I regard this twin compulsion as distinct, though related, moments of the very same narrative process that might appear as a concentration or a dispersal. The narratives of Linda Brent, Frederick Douglass, and Malcolm El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (aspects of which are examined in this essay) each represent both narrative ambitions as they occur under the auspices Of "author." Relatedly, we might interpret the whole career of African-Americans, a decisive factor in national political life since the mid-seventeenth century, in light of the intervening, intruding tale, or the tale— like Brent's "garret" space— "between the lines," which are already inscribed, as a metaphor of social and cultural management. According to this reading, gender, or sex-role assignation, or the clear differentiation of sexual stuff, sustained elsewhere in the culture, does not emerge for the African-American female in this historic in- stance, except indirectly, except as a way to re-enforce through the process of birthing, "the reproduction of the relations of production" that involves "the reproduction of the values and behavior patterns necessary to maintain the system of hierarchy in its various aspects of gender, class, and race or ethnicity" (Margaret Strobel, "Slavery and Reproductive Labor in Mombasa," Robertson and Klein 1211. Following Strobel's lead, I would suggest that the foregoing identifies one of the three categories of reproductive labor that African-American females carry out under the regime of captivity. But this replication of ideology is never simple in the case of female subject-positions, and it appears to acquire a thickened layer of motives in the case of African-American females. If we can account for an originary narrative and judicial principle that might have engendered a "Moynihan Report," many years into the twentieth century, we cannot do much better than look at Goodell's reading of the partus sequitur ventrem: the condition of the slave mother is "forever entailed on all her remotest posterity." This maxim of civil law, in Goodell's view, the "genuine and degrading principle of slavery, inasmuch as it places the slave upon a level with brute animals, prevails universally in the slave-holding states" (Goodell 271. But what is the "condition" of the mother? Is it the "condition" of enslavement the writer means, or does he mean the "mark" and the "knowledge" of the mother upon the child that here translates into the culturally forbidden and impure? In an elision of terms, "mother" and "enslavement" are indistinct categories Of the illegitimate inasmuch as each Of these synonymous elements defines, in effect, a cultural situation that is father-lacking. Goodell, who does not only report this maxim Of law as an aspect Of his own factuality, but also regards it, as does Douglass, as a fundamental degradation, supposes descent and identity through the female line as comparable to a brute animality. Knowing already that there are human communities that align social reproductive procedure according to the line of the mother, and Goodell himself might have known it some years later, we can only conclude that the provisions of patriarchy, here exacerbated by the preponderant powers of an enslaving class, declare Mother Right, by definition, a negating feature of human community. Even though we are not even talking about any Of the matriarchal features Of social production/reproduction — matrifocality, matrilinearity, matriarchy— when we speak Of the enslaved person, we perceive that the dominant culture, in a fatal misunderstanding, assigns a matriarchist value where it does not belong; actually misnames the power of the female regarding the enslaved community. Such naming is false because the female could not, in fact, claim her child, and false, once again, because "motherhood" is not perceived in the prevailing social climate as a legitimate procedure of cultural inheritance. The African-American male has been touched, therefore, by the mother, handed by her in ways that he cannot escape, and in ways that the white American male is allowed to temporize by a fatherly reprieve. This human and historic development— the text that has been inscribed on the benighted heart of the continent— takes us to the center of an inexorable difference in the depths of American women's community: the African-American woman, the mother, the daughter, becomes historically the powerful and shadowy evocation of a cultural synthesis long evaporated — the law of the Mother — only and precisely because legal enslavement removed the African-American male not so much from sight as from mimetic view as a partner in the prevailing social fiction of the Father's name, the Father's law. Therefore, the female, in this order of things, breaks in upon the imagination with a forcefulness that marks both a denial and an "illegitimacy." Because Of this peculiar American denial, the black American male embodies the only American community of males which has had the specific occasion to learn who the female is within itself, the infant child who bears the life against the could-be fateful gamble, against the odds of pulverization and murder, including her own. It is the heritage of the mother that the African-American male must regain as an aspect of his own personhood — the power of "yes" to the "female" within. This different cultural text actually reconfigures, in historically ordained discourse, certain representational potentialities for African-Americans: 1) motherhood as female blood- rite is outraged, is denied, at the very same time that it becomes the founding term Of a human and social enactment; 2) a dual fatherhood is set in motion, comprised of the African father's banished name and body and the captor father's mocking presence. In this play of paradox, only the female stands in the flesh, both mother and mother-dispossessed. This problematizing of gender places her, in my view, out of the traditional symbolics of female gender, and it is our task to make a place for this different social subject. In doing so, we are less interested in joining the ranks of gendered femaleness than gaining the insurgent ground as female social subject. Actually claiming the monstrosity (of a female with the potential to which her culture imposes in ---------, "Sapphire" might rewrite after all a radically different text for a female empowerment. The dream of political refinement and perfectability is itself the disguise of the juggernaught of anti-black violence that defines America. People like Trayvon Martin and Renisha Mcbride haunt any hope of progress American politics has because they serve as a constant reminder that any and all “progress” America makes… is based on a foundation of slavery and horror.Warren ‘15 (Calvin Warren, Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope, teacher /professor African American Philosophy/Literary Criticism; 19th Century African American History; Contemporary Continental Theory; Psychoanalysis (Lacanian); Ethics) The American dream, then, is realized through black suffering. It is the humiliated, incarcerated, mutilated, and terrorized black body that serves as the vestibule for the Democracy that is to come. In fact, it almost becomes impossible to think the Political without black suffering. According to this logic, corporeal fracture engenders ontological coherence, in a political arithmetic saturated with violence. Thus, nonviolence is a misnomer, or somewhat of a ruse. Black-sacrifice is necessary to achieve the American dream and its promise of coherence, progress, and equality. We find similar logic in the contemporary moment. Renisha McBride, Jordon Davis, Kody Ingham, Amadou Diallo, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Frederick Jermain Carter, Chavis Carter, Timothy Stansbury, Hadiya Pendleton, Oscar Grant, Sean Bell, Kendrec McDade, Trayvon Martin, and Mike Brown, among others, constitute a fatal rupture of the Political; these signifiers, stained in blood, refuse the closure that the Political promises. They haunt political discourses of progress, betterment, equality, citizenship, and justice—the metaphysical organization of social existence. We are witnessing a shocking accumulation of injured and mutilated black bodies, particularly young black bodies, which place what seems to be an unanswerable question mark in the political field: if we are truly progressing toward this “society-that-is-to-come (maybe),” why is black suffering increasing at such alarming rates? In response to this inquiry, we are told to keep struggling, keep “hope” alive, and keep the faith. After George Zimmerman was acquitted for murdering Tray- von Martin, President Obama addressed the nation and importuned us to keep fighting for change because “each successive generation seems to be making progress in changing attitudes toward race” and, if we work hard enough, we will move closer to “becoming a more perfect union.” Despite Martin’s corpse lingering in the minds of young people and Zimmerman’s smile of relief after the verdict, we are told that things are actually getting better. Supposedly, the generation that murdered Trayvon Martin and Renisha McBride is much better than the generation that murdered Emmett Till. Black suffering, here, is instrumentalized to accomplish pedagogical, cathartic, and redemptive objectives and, somehow, the growing number of dead black bodies in the twenty-first century is an indication of our progress toward “perfection.” Is perfection predicated on black death? How many more black bodies must be lynched, mutilated, burned, castrated, raped, dismembered, shot, and disabled before we achieve this “more perfect union”? In many ways, black suffering and death become the premiere vehicles of political perfection and social maturation. Leading us to our advocacy that Lily and I advocate for the rejection of the resolution on the basis of America’s and China’s antiblackness, analyzing such through a black feministic and nihilistic standpoint.Warren 15 (Calvin L. Warren,“Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope.” Spring 2015. Assistant Professor of American Studies, and has a Ph.D, @ Yale University) The politics of hope masks a particular cruelty under the auspices of “happiness” and “life.” It terrifies with the dread of “no alternative.” “Life” itself needs the security of the alternative, and, through this logic, life becomes untenable without it. Political hope promises to provide this alternative—a discursive and political organization beyond extant structures of violence and destruction. The construction of the binary “alternative/no-alternative” ensures the hegemony and dominance of political hope within the ontoexistential horizon. The terror of the “no alternative”—the ultimate space of decay, suffering, and death—depends on two additional binaries: “problem/ solution” and “action/inaction.” According to this politics, all problems have solutions, and hope provides the accessibility and realization of these solutions. The solution establishes itself as the elimination of “the problem”; the solution, in fact, transcends the problem and realizes Hegel’s aufheben in its constant attempt to sublate the dirtiness of the “problem” with the pristine being of the solution. No problem is outside the reach of hope’s solution— every problem is connected to the kernel of its own eradication. The politics of hope must actively refuse the possibility that the “solution” is, in fact, another problem in disguised form; the idea of a “solution” is nothing more than the repetition and disavowal of the problem itself. The solution relies on what we might call the “trick of time” to fortify itself from the deconstruction of its binary. Because the temporality of hope is a time “not-yet-realized,” a future tense unmoored from present-tense justifications and pragmatist evidence, the politics of hope cleverly shields its “solutions” from critiques of impossibility or repetition. Each insistence that these solutions stand up against the lessons of history or the rigors of analysis is met with the rationale that these solutions are not subject to history or analysis because they do not reside within the horizon of the “past” or “present.” Put differently, we can never ascertain the efficacy of the proposed solutions because they escape the temporality of the moment, always retreating to a “not-yet” and “could-be” temporality. This “trick” of time offers a promise of possibility that can only be realized in an indefinite future, and this promise is a bond of uncertainty that can never be redeemed, only imagined. In this sense, the politics of hope is an instance of the psychoanalytic notion of desire: its sole purpose is to reproduce its very condition of possibility, never to satiate or bring fulfillment. This politics secures its hegemony through time by claiming the future as its unassailable property and excluding (and devaluing) any other conception of time that challenges this temporal ordering. The politics of hope, then, depends on the incessant (re)production and proliferation of problems to justify its existence. Solutions cannot really exist within the politics of hope, just the illusion of a different order in a future tense. The “trick” of time and political solution converge on the site of “action.” In critiquing the politics of hope, one encounters the rejoinder of the dangers of inaction. “But we can’t just do nothing! We have to do something.” The field of permissible action is delimited and an unrelenting binary between action/ inaction silences critical engagement with political hope. These exclusionary operations rigorously reinforce the binary between action and inaction and discredit certain forms of engagement, critique, and protest. Legitimate action takes place in the political—the political not only claims futurity but also action as its property. To “do something” means that this doing must translate into recognizable political activity; “something” is a stand-in for the word “politics”—one must “do politics” to address any problem. A refusal to “do politics” is equivalent to “doing nothing”—this nothingness is constructed as the antithesis of life, possibility, time, ethics, and morality (a “zero-state” as Julia Kristeva [1982] might call it). The black body is the Hei Ren under ChinaLevitt, 11 [“N-word products in China are commonplace”, Thegrio.com, TR, October 8th, 2011] branford Marsalis has a song called “Dance of the Hei Gui” on his record entitled, I Heard You Twice the First Time. Scrolling the Internet, no one asked the question, what exactly is a Hei Gui? Let me explain with a basic Chinese lesson. Hei or 黑 means: black. Gui or 鬼means: ghost. If you put them together, they translate into the n-word. Why is this important? Well in this case, Marsalis is surely being ironic and using foreign racial epithets to make an artistic statement. Themusic was solid, but the title flew over most people’s heads. In the 1920’s the company Hawley & Hazel Chemical Co. from Hong Kong developed a toothpaste called “Darkie,” with a logo of a man in blackface with gleaming white teeth. Upon the company’s acquisition by Colgate-Palmolive in the 1980s its logo changed to a race-neutral top-hatted man, and was renamed “Darlie.” The problem, as people noted at the time, was that changing the English name simply absolved westerners of having to see a racial slur on a piece of consumer packaging. In Chinese though, the name stayed the same: “black man’s toothpaste.” Why the name wasn’t changed in the Chinese version is a good question, considering maintaining such a name only serves to reinforce racial stereotypes. Today, I can go into a shop here in Beijing and buy “Black Man” and “Black Sister” toothpastes. Recently, I was doing some research into the n-word here in China, and found some startling stuff. On the Chinese version of eBay, taobao.com, I found a medicine called, “n-word-oil” or 黑鬼油。The packaging from various manufacturers either had a black man with a rag on his head, with the word “darkie” written underneath his image, an Arab with a black beard, or no human logo at all. What is “n-word-oil”? Well, it turns out that this medicinal remedy is for muscle pain and a host of other ailments the Chinese have been using for a very long time. It’s ubiquitous in Chinese medicine shops worldwide, including in the U.S. Another product — a tanning oil — also is known as “n-word oil” in Chinese. I asked a Chinese friend, who’s 53, about this oil and he hadn’t heard of it. In fact, he didn’t believe it was called that until I showed him the picture, and he said he found the name offensive, and that if blacks knew about it they would find it very offensive. Why is this a problem? It reflects an attitude by some in China that has gone unchecked, because people ignore it since it’s in another language. But racism in any language is worthy of our attention. Africans and African-Americans are coming in increasing numbers to China to do business or to study, and it seems that China can no longer hide behind the fact that this is a medicinal remedy that has existed for over 100 years — that somehow being traditional gets them out of answering a charge on full-on racism. Also, Chinese people more than ever are involved in America in ways that are getting more and more complex given the financial closeness of the two nations. When people criticized “Darkie” toothpaste it forced a name change for the English-speaking world because consumers make businesses accountable. But “Darkie” toothpaste was for a Chinese consumer population, and by not changing the Chinese name these efforts didn’t go far enough. The manufacturers of “n-word oil” need to hear that people are onto them, and that as Americans we can choose to ban those retailers who offer offensive products — whether knowingly or not — in America. Amazon.com is one retailer that sells this very product under the direct translation, “black ghost oil.” China and their products are not immune to criticism just because we remain in financial debt to them. Download 356.95 Kb. Share with your friends:
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