If you have any questions about our aff, e-mail me at michael_ely16@yahoo.com. Below is our 1ac. Things may occasionally change (taking out a sentence from the ranting) but the evidence has remained the same.
Recently, I was studying history, a favorite past time of students with nothing better to do on a Saturday night. As a young man concerned with the news and policy, I had been watching the reports over the revolutions taking place in the Near East and North Africa, and was spending my time trying to make sense of it. There was a separation in my study and my approach, my notes didn't quite fit the time line I had constructed for myself. After wandering around the library for no particular purpose I noticed that we are in “this "realm of Between," this "No-more of the gods that have fled and the Not-yet of the god that is coming,"” a “state of a-partness … the imperative for this oppositional intellectual is precisely to think the excess that the globalization (the end) of technological thinking cannot finally contain … All of a sudden, I looked at the clock and realized it was time for class. My professor was old, but took great interest in teaching young students. He seemed to take a special liking to undergraduates. He was lecturing on the changes of civilization and learned about how Ancient Greeks discovered democracy and that it was passed from one civilization to the next via divine right until finally, it landed at Plymouth rock. It had traveled nearly for thousands of years just to get there. And then it had arrived. It was destined you see. It was then the job of those Puritans, much like their counterparts in Jamestown to overcome the failure of Roanoke and establish a government that would respect the crown and live a godly life in the “New World”. We then learned that it was the will of the heavens that the American public caste off the yolk of its colonial tyranny to form, for the benefit of all mankind, the Confederacy. Noticing its weakness however, after much true and deliberate debate by those kindly representatives, the founding fathers created the Constitution establishing a strong United States. As luck would have it, we got the French to follow suit. This would be useful when again years later, the English, those damned dirty dogs, tried to take back what was rightfully ours. Then again when we had to bring the South back into line. It would be our salvation from foreign threats both alien and seditious. We would use it to defeat the Spanish, the Mexicans, the Germans, the Italians, the Russians, the Japanese and the Germans again for good measure. We would spread democracy to all of those poor countries without it, the Phillipines, the Hawaaians, we were good enough to let them get in on the game, Puerto Ricans, Koreans, Vietnamese, Afghanis, Iraqis and so many others. I couldn't help myself. I didn't even realize when I had done it. Without raising my hand I objected “Dr. those actions were violent. They played to the same imperialist logic that either accomodates or banishes all difference. Remember, citizens of Iraq wanted Saddham out, so we incorporated them into the liberal democratic system, but when we found that their notions of democracy were far different than the world picture we had planned out, we banished them into the role of terrorists and 'crazies'!”. His face squeezed tight. It appeared that he was trying to come up with a response but couldn't find one. The world, as it appeared to me, had come to induce education for the very purposes advancing military might and thought be it soft or hard. This takes shape in academic debate whereby, “the debate system is a rigged process,...it's framed to exclude anything that the frame can't contain and domesticate. To frame...means to "prearrange" so that a particular outcome is assured, which also means the what's outside of the frame doesn't stand a chance: is "framed" from the beginning... the perspective or frame of reference fundamental to knowledge production in democratic-capitalist societies - that enabled me to see what the so called distinterestness of empirical inquiry is blind to or, more accurately willfully represses in its Panglossian pursuit of the truth." We've seen this paralleled in the media representations of the revolutions taking place in the Near East and North Africa where “Since the beginning of the Egyptian uprising” used to create “ a new grand-narrative about this so-called revolution...This narrative appears to be replacing the long held “Arab Exceptionalism” narrative...its seamless replacement dubbed the “Arab Awakening,” is being constructed on the very same bases of representation. The fundamental pillars of these Orientalist understandings of Arab societies and individuals are based on: 1) “othering”...2) romanticization and exotization”. It is clear to see that “both academics and the media (international and local) are appropriating, interpreting, and representing the recent events along the same pillars of othering and, romanticization, while casting universalist-Eurocentic judgments.” I recounted watching Anderson Cooper watch Rachel Maddow who was asking Fareed Zakaria represent the “recent uprising … as a youth, non-violent revolution in which social media … are champions. The underlying message here is that it these “middle-class” educated youth … are not “terrorists,” they hold the same values as “us” (the democratic West), and finally use the same tools … that “we” invented and use in our daily-lives. They are just like “us” and hence they deserve celebration. … the majority of the Egyptian population and those who participated in the uprising are of the subaltern classes is both disturbing and telling. … the class composition of dissent has been cloaked by a new imaginary homogenous construct called “youth.” In this construct, the media and academic analysts lump together the contradictory and often conflictual interests of ‘yuppies’ … with those of the unemployed, who live under the poverty line in rural areas and slum-areas.
Alongside the icon of the homogenous … is the tailoring and reduction of the values, tools, and tactics of the uprising to fit a ‘Western ‘and ‘local’ upper-middle class audience. … This selective focus on one form of tactic is in-factual. … it functions as the reverse mirror image of the “terrorist” stereotype hinting of a pernicious fetishization and exotization. … The “educated,” “Western,” and “exposed” cosmopolitan Egyptians who are portrayed as the sole agents of this “revolution” cannot torch police-stations, and those who did –the subaltern- should be and are excluded from the picture....The active agents of this narration are not only the media and politicians, but academics and international donors’ funding agencies. … we are witnessing the “empire” painting the picture of the “fringe” and within this fringe the subaltern- “the fringe of the fringe”- are being outcast.”
“That's discourse! That's representation! That's not reality, that's not culture!” responded my professor as my peers looked at me with disgust and bewilderment. “No, we have to recognize that these representations are not divorced however from the reality of our situation, instead 'the language of Orientalism plays the dominant role. It brings opposites together as "natural,"... it ascribes reality and reference to objects …of its own making...one does not really make discourse at will; or statements in it, without first belonging-in some cases unconsciously, but at any rate involuntarily-to the ideology and the institutions that guarantee its existence. These latter are always the institutions of an advanced society dealing with a less advanced society, a strong culture encountering a weak one. …mythic discourse is that it conceals its own origins as well as those of what it describes. "Arabs" are presented in the imagery of static, almost ideal types, and neither as creatures with a potential in the process of being realized nor as history being made. …the Orientalist the language speaks the Arab Oriental, not vice versa.
The room got more silent than I thought it could and it was in this silent that I recognized that the other that the media and the imperial world attempts to represent exists. It was a dawning moment. I realized “These "others," presently absent and absently present,” escape “representation at the same time that they are represented, repeat the problematic of belonging at a global moment that calls itself "post"... the "absent presence" of these "radical others" haunts the politics of our global "post" moment by unconcealing the failures of its unfulfilled prophecies with their spectral silence. … To speak about the specter, … is an impossible task. … the specter is "the marginal- -the radical Other- -that is either accommodated to or banished from the totalizing circle articulated by the concentering logos of Imperial metaphysics"... it is what escapes representation (even when it appears to be fully represented) … demanding a rethinking of thinking, … forgetting the silence of the specter means forgetting the "other," forgetting being itself. This … implies the tendency to relax in the comfort that our "post" so euphorically promises and not contemplate the "other," whose exclusion, accommodation, or even violation feeds the illusion of this comfort.
Finally, my professor lost his cool. He started yelling “Derek! That isn't the point of this lecture. We are trying to focus on the benefits of democracy and the assistance that we give other countries! There is a long tradition that we have to observe here!” He didn't take it as well as I thought he would. He continued, “We have to help. We have to stabilize the world! It would be anarchy otherwise!”. That was when I understood his canon. His body of disinterested inquiry has, since last December “represented the revolution according to the … ideological dictates of the … American discursive regime … to “stabilize” the revolutionary movement the volatility of which threatens American hegemony in the Middle East …The technology of the media – the mobile television camera, instant electronic mobility, the roving correspondent, and so on … conceals this perennial panoptic view from above – the “center elsewhere “ - - that renders the below “lowly,” if not entirely invisible … The media, by way of the correspondents’ presence and the instantaneity of his/her message, convey the impression of their disinterestedness. They give the viewer at home the sense that they are there, in the midst of the historical events in Tahrir Square. And this impression is enhanced by occasional sound-bite conversations with the rebels. But this … sense of “being there” … is an illusion. … they name the unnamable, Speak the unspeakable, Identify the unidentifiable, give (prescribed) Voice to voiceless, and thus, ... domesticate the “beast” of revolution.” And it is precisely that role of being “at-home” that the revolution is supposed to occupy, according to modern policy analysis. This naming however is precisely what allows us to accommodate or banish any notion of difference or otherness that might take place. The current revolutions however produced something different in the Western mind. “this Revolution is radically unlike all other revolutions of the modern era. ... this Arab Revolution was spontaneous: a surge of resistant force emanating from an existential condition, rather than … ideological or … preconceived strategic ends. All of the characteristics of this Revolution, … resist the representational system – the “regime of truth” … endemic to Western modernity. … this Arabic Revolution refuse to accept the name the modern West has devised to explain – and contain – revolutions, thus signaling the nothing that the truth discourse of the … West will monomaniacally have nothing to do with, the void that haunts the latter’s discursive plenitude. … they, … “prefer not to” be answerable to the calling of … American, modernity or, … to be interpellated by the democratic/capitalist “problematic.” ….it is not a particular oppressed class … recognizable to the oppressive regime that has ignited the revolts in Tunis and Cairo … it is, … the “people” … in all their amorphous and indefinable singularity … the very disposable non-entities, … to which the nation-state has reduced their humanity, now, however, understood positively. … those whom the discursive regime … of the dominant culture (in this case the authoritative regimes ventriloquized by Western colonialism) have bereaved of a language and, therefore,... a polity. … let me invoke here an emergent language, … to address the radical singularity of the subject emerging out of the rubble of the fallen structured/regimented imperial world. … The Arabic Revolution … has been instigated by the multitude of identityless identities - - those who don’t count (have, for all practical purposes, no being … that Western knowledge will have nothing to do with - - in a global age and place where what counts is determined, … by … the Western nation-state system”.
With that in mind, We affirm the singularity of this years resolution. We can't even do research anymore. The media has already admitted that they know nothing, but everybody has to get a paycheck. The media thus has to watch the media to produce the media. That is, the unnamability which, when disclosed, cannot and indeed prefers not to be named, identified or integrated into any system of exchange. This is a specter, an alterity, that always already haunts the center from a position which cannot be assimilated into the dominant order. It is the position of the nothing, the no-thing. It is the the paradox of the center that wants nothing to do with the nothing while simultaneously attempting to produce something in its place. This takes place in our attempts to forget the specter which always reproduces itself.
It is precisely this singularity which makes most normative and instrumental affirmations disinterested. This topic, just like these revolutions, is completely unique. We are in the midst of this topic and in that, we can't hope to diagnose and determine the view of the world. Doing so would only risk the continuation of late Orientalist logic as prescription. This role has been “set for it as a "modernizing" one, which means that it gives legitimacy and authority to ideas about modernization, progress, and culture that it receives from the United States … if all told there is an intellectual acquiescence in the images and doctrines of Orientalism, there is also a very powerful reinforcement of this in economic, political, and social exchange: the modem Orient, … participates in its own Orientalizing.”
This internalization then becomes as vicious cycle as it “replicates itself, although today there are really no big empty spaces, … We live in one global environment with … ecological, economic, social, and political pressures tearing at its … fabric. Anyone with even a vague consciousness of this whole is alarmed at how such remorselessly selfish and narrow interests-... -can in fact lead to mass destructiveness. The world simply cannot afford this many more times.
In order to avoid falling into this trap of Orientalism, the “first initiative must of necessity proceed by indirection. … the vast majority in the United States … both liberal and conservative, has expressed sympathy for the revolution, ranging from anxious approval to enthusiasm. But these official and mediatic readings have been almost invariably represented from the Western, especially American, perspective. … they have, predictably, viewed the uprising on the analogy of the (exceptionalist) American Revolution: a revolt not simply against the tyranny of “undeveloped” or “anti-modern” authoritarian regimes, but also, as the insistent focus on the inordinate wealth accumulated by the various despots suggests, the luxurious life style (decadence) achieved at the expense of the oppressed people of their ruling elite and, thus, a demand for American-style – capitalist - - “democracy.” … these official and mediatic American representations almost universally perceive the uprisings … as, above all, the initiatives of huge populations of “Westernized” dissident Arab youths. Needless to say, I left my professor's classroom without a need to go back. Instead I walked away from the academy. This was a moment of errancy, and one that needed to take place in order to produce a different method of thought, that which is interested, involved and in the midst. We must remember, we are always already in the midst.
They then reported on the revolutions spread into Egypt. Then into Yemen, Libya, Syria, Bahrain a man even lit himself on fire in Algeria. It was with this explosion that the media “Since the beginning of the Egyptian uprising” used to create “ a new grand-narrative about this so-called revolution...This narrative appears to be replacing the long held “Arab Exceptionalism” narrative...its seamless replacement dubbed the “Arab Awakening,” is being constructed on the very same bases of representation. The fundamental pillars of these Orientalist understandings of Arab societies and individuals are based on: 1) “othering”...2) romanticization and exotization”. It is clear to see that “both academics and the media (international and local) are appropriating, interpreting, and representing the recent events along the same pillars of othering and, romanticization, while casting universalist-Eurocentic judgments.” While I sat in class and listened to my professor spout off the list of American achievements, particularly the First Amendment which was capable of authorizing a free media, I couldn't help but notice that “the recent uprising is constructed as a youth, non-violent revolution in which social media … are champions. The underlying message here is that it these “middle-class” educated youth … are not “terrorists,” they hold the same values as “us” (the democratic West), and finally use the same tools … that “we” invented and use in our daily-lives. They are just like “us” and hence they deserve celebration. … the majority of the Egyptian population and those who participated in the uprising are of the subaltern classes is both disturbing and telling. … the class composition of dissent has been cloaked by a new imaginary homogenous construct called “youth.” In this construct, the media and academic analysts lump together the contradictory and often conflictual interests of ‘yuppies’ … with those of the unemployed, who live under the poverty line in rural areas and slum-areas.
Alongside the icon of the homogenous … is the tailoring and reduction of the values, tools, and tactics of the uprising to fit a ‘Western ‘and ‘local’ upper-middle class audience. … This selective focus on one form of tactic is in-factual. … it functions as the reverse mirror image of the “terrorist” stereotype hinting of a pernicious fetishization and exotization. … The “educated,” “Western,” and “exposed” cosmopolitan Egyptians who are portrayed as the sole agents of this “revolution” cannot torch police-stations, and those who did –the subaltern- should be and are excluded from the picture.
The active agents of this narration are not only the media and politicians, but academics and international donors’ funding agencies. … we are witnessing the “empire” painting the picture of the “fringe” and within this fringe the subaltern- “the fringe of the fringe”- are being outcast.”
It was then that my professor raised his voice. “Derek! You haven't been paying attention. If you are going to pass this class, you have to know the importance of the American Revolution. Class, what is that importance?” I looked around at my classroom to see Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton, Fareed Zakahria, Rachel Maddow, Warren Buffet, Barack Obama, Toby Kieth and Will Repko answer in unison “the American Revolution was the catalyst for all liberal democratic revolutions using Enlightenment thought in the Eighteenth Century and after”. I thought back to Egypt, to Tunisia to all of the countries in radical change. Their framing didn't fit. I couldn't explain why but I knew that there was something different, no not different but other about this situation. I thought about my classmate's responses over the semester and realized that, “ the vast majority in the United States … both liberal and conservative … expressed sympathy for the revolution … But these … readings have been … from the … American, perspective. … they have … viewed the uprising on the analogy of the … American Revolution: a revolt not simply against the tyranny of “undeveloped” or “anti-modern” authoritarian regimes, but also, … a demand for American-style – capitalist - - “democracy … these … representations … perceive the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, and Libya as … the initiatives of huge populations of “Westernized” dissident Arab youths. … who have been educated according to “progressive” Western “secular” standards – disinterested inquiry, global English, individualism, self-reliance, gender equality, the can-do perspective, the parliamentary nation-state, technology, and so on … This … “Americanization” of the Revolution in the Arab countries … is especially borne witness to by the immediate and then more considered responses of American officialdom and the media to the sudden domino effect of the Tunisian uprising … the Obama administration began to distance itself from the Egyptian dictator, without, however, breaking its ties with the regime. This initiative, which the media … mimicked, was epitomized by the president’s famous call to this erstwhile ally of the United State to terminate his rule “now,” which, … insisted, against the demands of the rebels, on a gradualist process of transition of power from dictatorship to democracy … the Obama administration and the mainstream media have … represented the Revolution … according to the … dictates of … American exceptionalism. … What the panoptic gaze of the Obama administration and the media sees in the squares of Cairo, Tunis, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, and elsewhere in the Arab world is … despite the potential for American-style democracy, a volatile multitude … that, according to the … colonial/Orientalist tradition, is thus susceptible to the manipulation of the fanatic directionality of a theocratic, if not Jihadist, Islam. In looking around the class room, my fellow students as people of power, intellectuals, elites, reporters all learning from and repeating the hallowed words of our prophetic professor that I came to another realization “this … Orientalist perspective is … borne witness to by the “analyses” of the “area experts” – Middle Eastern, globalist, former American diplomats – whom … CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, PBS – have relied on, … to interpret the volatile events unfolding in … North Africa and the Middle East. … these policy pundits, whatever the differences between their analyses, have all, … represented the revolution according to the … ideological dictates of the … American discursive regime … to “stabilize” the revolutionary movement the volatility of which threatens American hegemony in the Middle East …The technology of the media – the mobile television camera, instant electronic mobility, the roving correspondent, and so on … conceals this perennial panoptic view from above – the “center elsewhere “ - - that renders the below “lowly,” if not entirely invisible … The media, by way of the correspondents’ presence and the instantaneity of his/her message, convey the impression of their disinterestedness. They give the viewer at home the sense that they are there, in the midst of the historical events in Tahrir Square. And this impression is enhanced by occasional sound-bite conversations with the rebels. But this … sense of “being there” … is an illusion. … they name the unnamable, Speak the unspeakable, Identify the unidentifiable, give (prescribed) Voice to voiceless, and thus, ... domesticate the “beast” of revolution.”
It came back. That haunting sinking feeling returned as my professor began explaining the similarities between students burning police stations in the Near East and us. He said, we know them because we can observe them. In fact, it's almost like we are there. Study, academic inquiry, the media, all of these things reduce that space. I couldn't take it anymore as I began to break out into a cold sweat. Finally, this feeling I had had for so long couldn't be kept down any longer. I broke the reverent silence. “Stop it!” I yelled, “The Revolution that ignited spontaneously in Tunisia in the spring of 2011... is a Revolution taking place,... in ... nation-states that were founded for nothing more than strategic reasons by Western imperial powers in the World War I era and, ... with ... the emergence of the Cold War, became clients or enemy’s of the United States and its global New World Order. ... this Revolution is radically unlike all other revolutions of the modern era. ... this Arab Revolution was spontaneous: a surge of resistant force emanating from an existential condition, rather than … ideological or … preconceived strategic ends. All of the characteristics of this Revolution, … resist the representational system – the “regime of truth” … endemic to Western modernity. … this Arabic Revolution refuse to accept the name the modern West has devised to explain – and contain – revolutions, thus signaling the nothing that the truth discourse of the … West will monomaniacally have nothing to do with, the void that haunts the latter’s discursive plenitude. … they, … “prefer not to” be answerable to the calling of … American, modernity or, … to be interpellated by the democratic/capitalist “problematic.” ….it is not a particular oppressed class … recognizable to the oppressive regime that has ignited the revolts in Tunis and Cairo … it is, … the “people” … in all their amorphous and indefinable singularity … the very disposable non-entities, … to which the nation-state has reduced their humanity, now, however, understood positively. … those whom the discursive regime … of the dominant culture (in this case the authoritative regimes ventriloquized by Western colonialism) have bereaved of a language and, therefore,... a polity. … let me invoke here an emergent language, … to address the radical singularity of the subject emerging out of the rubble of the fallen structured/regimented imperial world. … The Arabic Revolution … has been instigated by the multitude of identityless identities - - those who don’t count (have, for all practical purposes, no being … that Western knowledge will have nothing to do with - - in a global age and place where what counts is determined, … by … the Western nation-state system”.
It was with this that my teacher rushed towards me. I had stood up at this time and didn't even notice. He limped as he ran in my direction. “Shut your mouth!”. “No! We have to know this!”. “Know what?” He asked. His eyes were wild and confused at the same time. “The fact that we don't know.” I said. We have to understand that these events in the Near East are precisely that. “They are an event. A singularity which is radically other to our understanding of the world. They resist the American exceptionalist narrative and we, even us in this classroom, are in the midst. We must be interested.” “I don't know about you but I found the lecture interesting” said Toby Keith as he polished off his boots which he would use to shove up the ass of any terrorist he laid his eyes on. “Damnit Toby!” I said, “it's different. Interested, from inter-esse, to be in the midst. We are lost, wandering. We can't see the end. The attempts to are metaphysical routines to view the world from above and behind. We must view the world from below”. “What in God's name are you talking about?” Snarled Cheney. “Our way of viewing the world is intimately tied to the way in which we live. The two are co-constitutive...the language of Orientalism plays the dominant role. … it ascribes reality and reference to objects … of its own making. Mythic language is discourse, … it cannot be anything but systematic; one does not really make discourse at will; or statements in it, without first belonging- … to the ideology and the institutions that guarantee its existence. These latter are always the institutions of an advanced society dealing with a less advanced society, a strong culture encountering a weak one. The principal feature of mythic discourse is that it conceals its own origins as well as those of what it describes. "Arabs" are presented in the imagery of static, almost ideal types, and neither as creatures with a potential in the process of being realized nor as history being made. … For the Orientalist the language speaks the Arab Oriental, not vice versa.” The students began pushing me out of the class, Maddow bit me in the shin while Obama started informing everyone that I was a socialist and in a weird turn of events, didn't actually have a birth certificate. Zakaria was cutting me out of class pictures he had painted while Clinton called his buddies to defame me publicly. “Learn your place!” Screamed the professor as I began tearing notebooks to pieces. “No”, I fired back “it's precisely that idea that creates the internalization of the colonial order”. “Be civilized you piece of shit!” He taunted without thinking. “Don't you see, it is precisely that call to be civilized, to be modern that the system relies on. Its role has been prescribed and set for it as a "modernizing" one, which means that it gives legitimacy and authority to ideas about modernization, progress, and culture that it receives from the United States … there is an intellectual acquiescence in the images and doctrines of Orientalism, there is also a very powerful reinforcement of this in economic, political, and social exchange: the modem Orient, in short, participates in its own Orientalizing.” “This system is unsustainable” I continued “the imperial cycle of the last century … replicates itself, although today there are really no big empty spaces, … We live in one global environment with... ecological, economic, social, and political pressures tearing at its... fabric. Anyone with even a vague consciousness of this whole is alarmed at how such remorselessly selfish and narrow interests-... -can in fact lead to mass destructiveness. The world simply cannot afford this many more times.” At that, my classmates had forced me out of the room. The walls looked different to me now. They weren't pristine, they weren't worth the time and money put in and they weren't to be respected. I didn't exist in those walls anymore. I was lost, an errant in the wilderness. this "realm of Between," this "No-more of the gods that have fled and the Not-yet of the god that is coming,"29 as Heidegger alternatively calls this state of a-partness (Abgeschiedenheit), the imperative for this oppositional intellectual is precisely to think the excess that the globalization (the end) of technological thinking cannot finally contain and to which it is blind. To underscore the presiding "white metaphor"
The ‘imperial reach’ represents a real threat to the popular opposition movements exploding throughout the Middle East and North Africa. The dangers exist not just in the ongoing military interventions via a United Nations-authorized turned NATO enforced No-Fly Zone in Libya, with Western powers taking an active role, but in internationally legitimated knowledge production and funding that fuel and make invisible the neoliberal agenda. The imperial reach extends throughout the region and attempts to monopolize ‘at home’, in an effort to maintain geopolitical relations of power….Western governments and observers defining the ‘Arab Spring’ on their own terms, especially in naming responsibility for the social uprisings in one way or another that comes back to the West (or as preferences may be, the ‘Euro-Atlantic axis’), and maintaining a ‘monopoly of expertise’ (Mitchell 2002). This effort of claiming and co-opting is funneled squarely to prop up the neoliberal agenda that has brought to the region much of what the movements have risen to reject … And the ‘assistance’ announced … for democratic transitions in the region is more of the same of what has been ‘offered’ for the last three decades – pre-packaged, trickledown prescriptions …
This indeed seems like an opportune ‘time of shock’ for the further implementation of neoliberal reforms,…these dangers signal a need for a collective effort among writers/commentators to ward off or resist the imperial reach of the tremendous momentum that has generated in the region for popular democracy rooted in social and economic justice.
Karavanta 2001 (Rethinking the Specter: Ama Ata Aidoo's Anowa. - Mosaic (Winnipeg)| December 01, 2001 | Karavanta, Assimina | COPYRIGHT 1999 University of Manitoba, Mosaic. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. ( HYPERLINK "javascript:if(typeof showhidecopy == %0A'function') { showhidecopy('bylinecopyhidden', 'bylinecopyshown'); }"Hide copyright information) HYPERLINK "javascript:if(typeof showhidecopy == 'function') { %0Ashowhidecopy('bylinecopyshown', 'bylinecopyhidden'); }"Copyright - HYPERLINK "http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:kxesBvNHQq8J:www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-81223361/rethinking-specter-ama-ata.html+spanos+haunts+imperialism&cd=11&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us"http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:kxesBvNHQq8J:www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-81223361/rethinking-specter-ama-ata.html+spanos+haunts+imperialism&cd=11&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)
SPANOS 2008 [William V, Professor at Binghamton, American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Specter of Vietnam, SUNY Press 2008, 23-24]
William V Spanos Interviewed by Christopher Spurlock (Professor at Binghamton University. Debate coach at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Accessed from: http://kdebate.com/spanos.html
Rabab El-Mahdi. “Orientalizing the Egyptian Uprising”. April 11, 2011. Jadaliyya. Accessed from: HYPERLINK "http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/1214/orientalising-the-egyptian-uprising"http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/1214/orientalising-the-egyptian-uprising – M.E.
Rabab El-Mahdi. “Orientalizing the Egyptian Uprising”. April 11, 2011. Jadaliyya. Accessed from: HYPERLINK "http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/1214/orientalising-the-egyptian-uprising"http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/1214/orientalising-the-egyptian-uprising – M.E.
Rabab El-Mahdi. “Orientalizing the Egyptian Uprising”. April 11, 2011. Jadaliyya. Accessed from: HYPERLINK "http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/1214/orientalising-the-egyptian-uprising"http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/1214/orientalising-the-egyptian-uprising – M.E.
Rabab El-Mahdi. “Orientalizing the Egyptian Uprising”. April 11, 2011. Jadaliyya. Accessed from: HYPERLINK "http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/1214/orientalising-the-egyptian-uprising"http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/1214/orientalising-the-egyptian-uprising – M.E.
Edward Said. “Orientalism”. Vintage Books. Random House Publishing. October 12, 1979. ISBN 0-394-74067-X. Accessed From: aaaaarg.org. Pg. 321. - M.E.
Karavanta 2001 (Rethinking the Specter: Ama Ata Aidoo's Anowa. - Mosaic (Winnipeg)| December 01, 2001 | Karavanta, Assimina | COPYRIGHT 1999 University of Manitoba, Mosaic. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. ( HYPERLINK "javascript:if(typeof showhidecopy == %0A'function') { showhidecopy('bylinecopyhidden', 'bylinecopyshown'); }"Hide copyright information) HYPERLINK "javascript:if(typeof showhidecopy == 'function') { %0Ashowhidecopy('bylinecopyshown', 'bylinecopyhidden'); }"Copyright - HYPERLINK "http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:kxesBvNHQq8J:www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-81223361/rethinking-specter-ama-ata.html+spanos+haunts+imperialism&cd=11&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us"http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:kxesBvNHQq8J:www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-81223361/rethinking-specter-ama-ata.html+spanos+haunts+imperialism&cd=11&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)
Spanos 2011. (William Spanos. “Revolutions”. Pg 2. Article forthcoming.
Edward Said. “Orientalism”. Vintage Books. Random House Publishing. October 12, 1979. ISBN 0-394-74067-X. Accessed From: aaaaarg.org. Pg. 324-325. - M.E.
Edward Said. “Culture and Imperialism”. Professor and Philosopher. Vintage Books. 1994. ISBN: 0-679-75054-1. Accessed from aaaaarg.org. Pg. 19 - 20. – M.E.
William Spanos. “Revolutions”. Pg 2. Article forthcoming.
Rabab El-Mahdi. “Orientalizing the Egyptian Uprising”. April 11, 2011. Jadaliyya. Accessed from: HYPERLINK "http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/1214/orientalising-the-egyptian-uprising"http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/1214/orientalising-the-egyptian-uprising – M.E.
Rabab El-Mahdi. “Orientalizing the Egyptian Uprising”. April 11, 2011. Jadaliyya. Accessed from: HYPERLINK "http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/1214/orientalising-the-egyptian-uprising"http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/1214/orientalising-the-egyptian-uprising – M.E.
Rabab El-Mahdi. “Orientalizing the Egyptian Uprising”. April 11, 2011. Jadaliyya. Accessed from: HYPERLINK "http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/1214/orientalising-the-egyptian-uprising"http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/1214/orientalising-the-egyptian-uprising – M.E.
Rabab El-Mahdi. “Orientalizing the Egyptian Uprising”. April 11, 2011. Jadaliyya. Accessed from: HYPERLINK "http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/1214/orientalising-the-egyptian-uprising"http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/1214/orientalising-the-egyptian-uprising – M.E.
Spanos 2011. Spanos Arab Spring article. Needs a cite.
Edward Said. “Orientalism”. Vintage Books. Random House Publishing. October 12, 1979. ISBN 0-394-74067-X. Accessed From: aaaaarg.org. Pg. 321. - M.E.
Edward Said. “Orientalism”. Vintage Books. Random House Publishing. October 12, 1979. ISBN 0-394-74067-X. Accessed From: aaaaarg.org. Pg. 324-325. - M.E.
Edward Said. “Culture and Imperialism”. Professor and Philosopher. Vintage Books. 1994. ISBN: 0-679-75054-1. Accessed from aaaaarg.org. Pg. 19 - 20. – M.E.
Below are a list of cards that we read nearly every round. All of the Spanos cards from the forthcoming article will have full text. I would tell you where we read them, but we don't go line by line. If you have any questions, let me know.
The Task of the humanist is to perform as the exilic intellectual. Spanos. Forthcoming.
43 “The task of the humanist is not just to occupy a position or place; not simply to belong somewhere, but rather to be both insider and outsider to the circulating ideas and values that are at issue in our society or someone else’s society or the society of the other. In this connection , it is invigorating to recall . . .Isaac Deutscher’s insufficiently known book of essays, The Non-Jewish Jew, for an account of how great Jewish thinkers – Spinoza, chief amongthem, as well as Freud, Heine, and Deutscher himself – were in, and at the same time renounced, their tradition, preserving the original tie by submitting it to the corrosive questioning that took them well beyond it, sometimes banishing them from community in theprocess.” Edward W. Sasid, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New Ork: Columbia University Pres, 2004), p. 77. Se also Said, Freud and the Non-European Euroepan (London: Verso: 2003), pp. 38 ff.
The singularity is not reducible to any one identity but rather fractures those concepts of juridicial subjects. Solves your offense.
Wall. 2011. Ian Wall. Critical Legal Thinking. Human Rights/ Philosophy/ Radical Politics.
A fairly traditional rendering of human rights posits a utopia...individual to a higher authority in order to seek redress.
Attempting to accommodate the singular into a play of difference promises the extermination of the other.
Akinbola 2011.
All that seeks to be singular and incomparable, ... we must keep alive the forms of the irreducible.
The moment you understand a revolution is the moment you kill it.
Deamer and Ely 2011. "The Moment We Understand a Revolution". www.kdebate.com/deamer.html
In "Deleuze and History", Craig Lundy suggests...This is the impasse of history.
We also often read cards about debate from the Spurlock and Spanos interview. All interviews within our ongoing project of interested inquiry can be found on kdebate.com It should give you a good idea of what we are interested in and what we are working on.
Their method of inquiry is disinterested. Produces bad education and a form of imperialism within academia.
Spurlock and Spanos 2011. http://kdebate.com/spanos.html
Following up on what I've just said...They invariably turn out to be murderous brutes.
We should focus on similarities over difference. The strategies are not incommensurate.
Spanos 2008. American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Specter of Vietnam. SUNY Press. Pg 248 - 249.
The purpose of this book, both the theoretical ... betrayal of its initial collaborative critical possibilities.
Their use of separation is bad and only leads to the problems they criticize. We should instead have a method of identityless identities.
Spanos 2000. America's Shadow: Anatomy of Empire.
The Vietnam War, as I have suggested, ... power relations in post-Enlightenment modernity.
We need to over determine ontology. Aff key to solve.
Spanos 2000.
More specifically, the relay of sites that is always uneven... I want to compensatorily put back into play a crucial category of the imperial project.
Law only rejects violence in the status quo because it cannot regulate that violence. Their focus on outcomes is only the attempt to incorporate violence into the system.
Spanos forthcoming.
I am thinking here of Walter Benjamin’s notion of “pure violence”: a “law-annihilating” violence against the state which will not tolerate a violence outside the law and, in thus enacting this “pure violence” – a violence which is a means without end , i.e non-vocational - - inaugurates a new, revolutionary historical era. See Benjamin, “The Critique of Violence,’ in Reflections , trans. I. Jephcott, ed. P. Demetz. ( ) I quote Giorgio Agamben’s succinct analysis of “pure violence” for convenience: “The aim of the essay is to ensure the possibility of a violence . . . that lies absolutely ‘outside’ . . . and ‘beyond’ . . . the law and that , as such, could shatter the dialectic between lawmaking violence and law-preserving violence . . . . Benjamin calls this other figure of violence ‘pure’ . . . or ‘divine’, and, in the human sphere, ‘revolutionary.’ What the law can never tolerate - - - what it feels as a threat with which it is impossible to come to terms – is the existence of a violence outside the law; and this is not because the ends of such violence are incompatible with law, but because of ‘its mere existence outside the law. . . . The task of Benjamin’s critique to prove the reality of such a violence: ‘If violence is also assured a reality outside the law, as pure immediate violence, this furnishes proof that revolutionary violence – which is the name for the highest manifestation of pure violence by man – is also possible.’’ The proper characteristic of this violence is that it neither makes nor preserves law, but deposes it . . and thus inaugurates a new historical epoch.” State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Pres, 2005), p. 52. See also, Werner Hamacher, “Afformative, Strike: Benjamin’s Critique of Violence,” in Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy : Destruction and Experience, eds. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (London: Routledge, 1994), 110-138; and Slavoj Zizek,
They police language.
Spanos forthcoming.
To return, after this detour into ontology, to the very worldly (ontic) events in North Africa and the Middle East, what I am suggesting, is 1) that the official West’s, particularly the American state’s, and its ventriloquized media’s, representation of the Arab Revolution, constitutes a frantic effort to bring to presence - - give a fixed identity or, at best, a related and relatable system of names to its existential force for the ultimate purpose of containing its differential dynamics within the admissible spatial parameters of the disciplinary discursive regime, which his to say, policing “it.”. Thus, as I have observed, the unrelenting and pervasive media spectacle – aided and abetted, alas, by all too many Western political radicals - - of a trial-and-error naming of the revolutionary force – the disgruntled “poor,” the “fellaheen,” the “unemployed,” “youth,” the “female sex,” the “working class,” the “adherents of Western style (capitalist) democracy,” “foreign intervention,” the “Muslin Brotherhood,” “Islamic jihadists,” the “military,” and so forth, or some combination of these related disciplinary/policing categories of the Western discursive regime – a wishful thinking that, of course, as in so many social upheavals of the past, can all too easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thus also, however – and this needs underscoring to register the “being” of it non-being - - the spectral quality of that revolutionary force that these Western categories would police - - accommodate, contain, domesticate, and administer at all costs in behalf of its ”higher cause” (the “big Other”): “its” refusal, like Bartleby the scrivener’s “I prefer not to,” to justify his inclusion in this now fragile triumphalist global history), to be answerable to the vocational calling of the interpellative Western state.i (I will return to Melville’e seminal figure of this nobody (homo tantum: “mere man and nothing more,” ii)
