Conditionality must be a reason to reject their team – their evasive survival tactics eliminates a necessary ethic of accountability to scholarship – [ ] their
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| Conditionality must be a reason to reject their team – their evasive survival tactics eliminates a necessary ethic of accountability to scholarship – [ ] their performative double-turns between X and Y flows devastate the efficacy of their advocacies because …
Collins, ‘90 (Patricia Hill, Distinguished University Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, Former head of the Department of African American Studies at the University of Cincinnati, and the past President of the American Sociological Association Council, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, p. 62-65) A second component of the ethic of caring concerns the appropriateness of emotions in dialogues. Emotion indicates that a speaker believes in the validity of an argument. Consider Ntozake Shange’s description of one of the goals of her work: "Our [Western] society allows people to be absolutely neurotic and totally out of touch with their feelings and everyone else’s feelings, and yet be very respectable. This, to me, is a travesty I’m trying to change the idea of seeing emotions and intellect as distinct faculties." The Black women’s blues tradition’s history of personal expressiveness heals this either/or dichotomous rift separating emotion and intellect. For example, in her rendition of "Strange Fruit," Billie Holiday’s lyrics blend seamlessly with the emotion of her delivery to render a trenchant social commentary on southern lynching. Without emotion, Aretha Franklin’s cry for "respect" would be virtually meaningless. A third component of the ethic of caring involves developing the capacity for empathy. Harriet Jones, a 16-year-old Black woman, explains to her interviewer why she chose to open up to him: "Some things in my life are so hard for me to bear, and it makes me feel better to know that you feel sorry about those things and would change them if you could." Without her belief in his empathy, she found it difficult to talk. Black women writers often explore the growth of empathy as part of an ethic of caring. For example, the growing respect that the Black slave woman Dessa and the white woman Rufel gain for one another in Sherley Anne William’s Dessa Rose stems from their increased understanding of each other’s positions. After watching Rufel fight off the advances of a white man, Dessa lay awake thinking: "The white woman was subject to the same ravishment as me; this the thought that kept me awake. I hadn’t knowed white mens could use a white woman like that, just take her by force same as they could with us." As a result of her newfound empathy, Dessa observed, "it was like we had a secret between us." These components of the ethic of caring: the value placed on individual expressiveness, the appropriateness of emotions, and the capacity for empathy-pervade African-American culture. One of the best examples of the interactive nature of the importance of dialogue and the ethic of caring in assessing knowledge claims occurs in the use of the call-and-response discourse mode in traditional Black church services. In such services both the minister and the congregation routinely use voice rhythm and vocal inflection to convey meaning. The sound of what is being said is just as important as the words themselves in what is, in a sense, a dialogue of reason and emotion. As a result it is nearly impossible to filter out the strictly linguistic-cognitive abstract meaning from the sociocultural psychoemotive meaning. While the ideas presented by a speaker must have validity (i.e., agree with the general body of knowledge shared by the Black congregation), the group also appraises the way knowledge claims are presented. There is growing evidence that the ethic of caring may be part of women’s experience as well. Certain dimensions of women’s ways of knowing bear striking resemblance to Afrocentric expressions of the ethic of caring. Belenky et al. point out that two contrasting epistemological orientations characterize knowing: one an epistemology of separation based on impersonal procedures for establishing truth and the other, an epistemology of connection in which truth emerges through care. While these ways of knowing are not gender specific, disproportionate numbers of women rely on connected knowing. The emphasis placed on expressiveness and emotion in African-American communities bears marked resemblance to feminist perspectives on the importance of personality in connected knowing. Separate knowers try to subtract the personality of an individual from his or her ideas because they see personality as biasing those ideas. In contrast, connected knowers see personality as adding to an individual’s ideas and feel that the personality of each group member enriches a group’s understanding. The significance of individual uniqueness, personal expressiveness, and empathy in African-American communities thus resembles the importance that some feminist analyses place on women’s "inner voice." The convergence of Afrocentric and feminist values in the ethic of caring seems particularly acute. White women may have access to a women’s tradition valuing emotion and expressiveness, but few Eurocentric institutions except the family validate this way of knowing. In contrast, Black women have long had the support of the Black church, an institution with deep roots in the African past and a philosophy that accepts and encourages expressiveness and an ethic of caring. Black men share in this Afrocentric tradition. But they must resolve the contradictions that confront them in searching for Afrocentric models of masculinity in the face of abstract, unemotional notions of masculinity imposed on them. The differences among race/gender groups thus hinge on differences in their access to institutional supports valuing one type of knowing over another. Although Black women may be denigrated within white-male-controlled academic institutions, other institutions, such as Black families and churches, which encourage the expression of Black female power, seem to do so, in part, by way of their support for an Afrocentric feminist epistemology. The Ethic of Personal Accountability An ethic of personal accountability is the final dimension of an alternative epistemology. Not only must individuals develop their knowledge claims through dialogue and present them in a style proving their concern for their ideas, but people are expected to be accountable for their knowledge claims. Zilpha Elaw’s description of slavery reflects this notion that every idea has an owner and that the owner’s identity matters: "Oh, the abominations of slavery! ... Every case of slavery, however lenient its infliction and mitigated its atrocities, indicates an oppressor, the oppressed, and oppression." For Elaw abstract definitions of slavery mesh with the concrete identities of its perpetrators and its victims. African-Americans consider it essential for individuals to have personal positions on issues and assume full responsibility for arguing their validity. Assessments of an individual’s knowledge claims simultaneously evaluate an individual’s character, values, and ethics. African-Americans reject the Eurocentric, masculinist belief that probing into an individual’s personal viewpoint is outside the boundaries of discussion. Rather, all views expressed and actions taken are thought to derive from a central set of core beliefs that cannot be other than personal. "Does Aretha really believe that Black women should get ‘respect, or is she just mouthing the words?" is a valid question in an Afrocentric feminist epistemology. Knowledge claims made by individuals respected for their moral and ethical connections to their ideas will carry more weight than those offered by less respected figures. An example drawn from an undergraduate course composed entirely of Black women which I taught might help to clarify the uniqueness of this portion of the knowledge validation process. During one class discussion I asked the students to evaluate a prominent Black male scholar’s analysis of Black feminism. Instead of severing the scholar from his context in order to dissect the rationality of his thesis, my students demanded facts about the author’s personal biography. They were especially interested in concrete details of his life, such as his relationships with Black women, his marital status, and his social class background. By requesting data on dimensions of his personal life routinely excluded in positivist approaches to knowledge validation, they invoked concrete experience as a criterion of meaning. They used this information to assess whether he really cared about his topic and drew on this ethic of caring in advancing their knowledge claims about his work. Furthermore, they refused to evaluate the rationality of his written ideas without some indication of his personal credibility as an ethical human being. The entire exchange could only have occurred as a dialogue among members of a class that had established a solid enough community to employ an alternative epistemology in assessing knowledge claims. The ethic of personal accountability is clearly an Afrocentric value, but is it feminist as well? While limited by its attention to middle-class, white women, Carol Gilligan’s work suggests that there is a female model for moral development whereby women are more inclined to link morality to responsibility, relationships, and the ability to maintain social ties. If this is the case, then African-American women again experience a convergence of values from Afrocentric and female institutions. The use of an Afrocentric feminist epistemology in traditional Black church services illustrates the interactive nature of all four dimensions and also serves as a metaphor for the distinguishing features of an Afrocentric feminist way of knowing. The services represent more than dialogues between the rationality used in examining bible texts and stories and the emotion inherent in the use of reason for this purpose. The rationale for such dialogues involves the task of examining concrete experiences for the presence of an ethic of caring. Neither emotion nor ethics is subordinated to reason. Instead, emotion, ethics, and reason are used as interconnected, essential components in assessing knowledge claims. In an Afrocentric feminist epistemology, values lie at the heart of the knowledge validation process such that inquiry always has an ethical aim. Alternative knowledge claims in and of themselves are rarely threatening to conventional knowledge. Such claims are routinely ignored, discredited, or simply absorbed and marginalized in existing paradigms, Much more threatening is the challenge that alternative epistemologies offer to he basic process used by the powerful to legitimate their knowledge claims. If the epistemology used to validate knowledge comes into question, then all prior knowledge claims validated under the dominant model become suspect. An alternative epistemology challenges all certified knowledge and opens up the question of whether what has been taken to be true can stand the test of alternative ways of validating truth. The existence of a self-defined Black women’s standpoint using an Afrocentric feminist epistemology calls into question the content of what currently passes as truth and simultaneously challenges the process of arriving at the truth. CpA market would thrive off exploitation and commodification, creating cycles of structural violence so the rich can live forever – that certainly doesn’t allow a positive articulation of otherness.Moniruzzaman, 11 (MONIR MONIRUZZAMAN (Ph.D. U of Toronto; MA U of Western Ontario) is an assistant professor jointly appointed in the Department of Anthropology and Center for Ethics and Humanities in Life Sciences at Michigan State University. “Inhumanity of Human Organ Trade” 2011, http://archive.thedailystar.net/forum/2011/October/organ.htm ) The advancement of transplant technology has created a thriving market of human organs worldwide. In China, organs are harvested from executed prisoners, while in South Asia, “fresh” organs are removed from the bodies of the poor populations. While poor people are at a high risk of organ failure (due to their dire living conditions), they usually die without receiving an organ transplant, let alone dialysis. At the same time, they serve as mere suppliers of body parts to prolong the lives of the affluent few. The organ trade is gravely exploitative, as Indian Dr. J. V. Thachil argues: “It is criminal to exploit the poor in order to keep less than one percent of the population alive”. In this trade, few of us would choose to sell our organs, yet the desperately poor are left with few prospects other than to sell their body parts. Those who benefit from this trade are recipients, brokers, doctors, and businessmen, while the poor are tricked and forced to sell their organs, and as a result endure severe suffering. Selling a kidney has devastating economic, social, and health impacts on kidney sellers. My research on 33 Bangladeshi kidney sellers reveals that 94% of them could not improve their economic circumstances by selling a kidney. Most sellers sold their kidneys to pay off their debt, but were back in debt within few years. In fact, 80% of these sellers did not receive the entire payment that they were promised. When the money was spent, they engaged in organ brokering to support their families. In addition, Bangladeshi sellers became socially isolated, were stigmatized, and experienced marital conflict due to selling their kidneys. Most of them not only regretted selling an organ, but also decided not to recommend that anyone sell a kidney. Further, these sellers experienced frequent illness, pain, weakness, and weight loss, as well as anxiety, distress, and depression after selling their kidneys. While the medical community has put the risk of death for kidney donors due to surgery at one in 3,000 (according to Bruzzone and Berloco, 2007), the death rate of Bangladeshi sellers could be higher, due to their terrible living condition and the fact that none of them received the promised post-operative care. What is more, the organ trade violates humanist, cultural, and religious principles, such as holism, integrity, and sacredness of the body, along with human dignity. The Bangladeshi sellers I interviewed believed that Allah was the owner of their body parts, and therefore they felt that selling His gift is intrinsically wrong. They stated that they could not preserve the wholeness of their body, and therefore were living in an undignified state, which they described as “sub-human.” Furthermore, organ trade is a slippery slope practice. We have already seen not only human kidneys, but also liver lobes, increasingly become market commodities in Bangladesh. How far can we go with the organ trade? Can we chop a leg and a hand from the poor, assuming that one of these body parts is sufficient for them? An organ trade would have much wider negative impacts, as well. It would likely impede the establishment of a cadaveric organ donation program. Also, it would create a market where wealthy patients would buy organs from the poor, whose price is lower. An organ trade would encourage moneylenders to force the poor, or husbands to force their wives, to sell organs for economic profit. Kzombie represents a polyvalent cultural trope without any singular interpretation – perm is the best option to studying the evolving notions of the zombie. Cohen, ‘12 [Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Professor of English, Director of Institute for Medieval & Early Modern Studies at Columbian College of Arts & Sciences, Ph.D., English and American Literature and Language, Harvard University; “Undead (A Zombie Oriented Ontology)”; Vol. 23, No. 3, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 2012] Despite the propensity of its audience and even its authors to subvert its pedagogical impetus, children’s media serve as form of diminishment and control. Because monsters make us uncomfortable we reduce their power by rendering them cute or otherwise abjecting them as infantile things, fears to be left behind as we assume our mature identities. Bram Stoker never imagined that Dracula would be transformed into Count Chocula, cartoon spokesmonster for sugary breakfast food, but such juvenilization is inevitable. The adorable little pixies now marketed so successfully to young girls under the Tinkerbell product line have as their grandparents medieval fairies whose crimes included rape, abduction, and murder. Is it cute or shocking that children can place decapitated zombie head lollipops in their mouths?6 Horror, comedy, and children’s culture reveal the same saturation. The zombie apocalypse is not to come. In our collective fantasies it has already unfolded, and we dwell in its aftermath. Just as the zombie swarm has captured various film, games, books and television, so the critical explanations for the zombie’s recent ubiquity are legion. Some excellent scholarship has been published on the embodied undead, from Jeffrey Weinstock’s prescient essay “Zombie TV” to the recent and insightful collection Better off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human and Kyle William Bishop’s American Zombie Gothic. Like the undead themselves zombie studies relentlessly continue to appear: no sooner is one essay or edited volume processed than another demands to be taken into account. Studying zombies is yet another mode of enjoying them, and this paradox inheres in their analysis: to understand the zombie’s cultural significance it is necessary to transform a creature that is all body into a cerebral puzzle. Or maybe it is to admit that the division between corporeal and intellectual pleasures—and phenomena—is not sustainable. The zombie apocalypse—or what Kyle Bishop more positively labels the Zombie Renaissance—has dawned for numerous reasons, many of them contradictory. The zombie is a monster polyvalent enough to incorporate a multitude of fears, desires, traumas and hopes. Because the word zombie migrated from Africa to Haiti to the United States and thence to Europe, zombies might seem transnational and epochal, but that does not mean they are not historicizable. George Romero’s ghouls in Night of the Living Dead, for example, offered “an allegorical condemnation of the atrocities of Vietnam, violent racism, and the opposition to the civil rights movement” (Bishop 14). Like all monsters, zombies are metaphors for that which disquiets their generative times. But while it is clear that images of the violence in Vietnam resonated with the early viewers of Romero’s film, few who watch today will associate that war with the movie’s profaned bodies. Yet Night of the Living Dead remains powerful forty-four years later. No single interpretation can capture a monstrous totality, no matter how persuasive that analysis might be. Monsters are more than the contexts that attended their births. Without the permutations grounding of the zombie in our analysis, we ignore the key metaphor utilized to create the ontological basis for antiblackness – the zombie is the best representative of the social death and forms the basis for true paradigmatic analysis. Fay, ‘8 [Jennifer Fay, Associate Professor of Cinema & Media Studies and English Director and Program in Cinema & Media Studies at Vanderbilt, Ph.D., Film Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison; “Dead Subjectivity: White Zombie, Black Baghdad”; Michigan State University Press. CR: Th e New Centennial Review, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2008] What is a zombie exactly? And what is the connection between its ontology and its representability, between its legal status and its position in the occupation workforce? Seabrook offers us this definition, one the White Zombie press books again quote verbatim: The zombie . . . is the soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life—it is a dead body which is made to talk and act, and move as if it were alive. People who have the power to do this go to a fresh grave, dig up the body before it has had time to rot, galvanize it into movement, and then make of it a servant or a slave, occasionally for the commission of some crime, more often simply as a drudge around the habitation of the farm, setting it dull heavy tasks, and beating it like a dumb beast if it slackens. (1929, 93) Taken with the penal code above, this definition presumes a distinction between life and its semblance. The unearthed body, like an animal and without a soul, is humanity’s mechanical nature come to life. Or, it is the biological remainder of politically and legally denuded existence. Already dead, the zombie can experience neither life nor death, nor is it beholden to categories of justice. Rather, it is pressed into the service of nonexistence so that its master may live well. In Haitian cultural history, the zombie has long served as an allegory for slavery and emancipation from colonial rule. As Markman Ellis explains, the zombie perfectly encapsulates the slave condition, especially as produced in colonial wars. Captured by the enemy, the slave is sentenced to perpetual labor in exchange for life. Slavery is the condition of execution deferred (2000, 209). And though the zombie was also a figure of slave rebellion—a coming into consciousness of one’s state of desocialized life—it was as an allegory of slavery that the zombie myth found new application during the occupation. “In Haiti,” writes Joan Dayan, “memories of servitude are transposed into a new idiom that both reproduced and dismantled a twentieth-century history of forced labor and denigration that became particularly acute during the American occupation of Haiti. As Haitians were forced to build roads, and thousands of peasants were brutalized and massacred, tales of zombies proliferated in the United States” (1995, 37).
Preston, ‘10 [John Preston, Professor of Education, Cass School of Education and Communities, University of East London; “Prosthetic white hyper-masculinities and 'disaster education'”; Ethnicities 2010 10: 331] Fixing visceral bodies: The Zombie Preparedness Initiative (ZPI) As considered earlier, for white hyper-masculine bodies to become transcendent, the bodies of people of colour must be ‘fixed in place’. With respect to this, Emergency is not just about Stauss but about how he foregrounds his journey as being part of a wider narrative between those who have the personal, but primitive, qualities to survive and those who do not. More generally in the personal preparedness literature there is a setting of those who have the ability to transcend corporeality and genres of conventional masculinity and whiteness against those who are inert and inactive or in need of protection. I will give two examples to illustrate this. First, in the preparedness literature terms such as ‘walking wounded’, ‘living dead’ and ‘zombies’ are used in describing those who do not have the ability to survive. The use of the latter term is particularly interesting as the historical relationship between ‘zombies’, ‘zombie films’ (and monster movies generally) and ‘race’ has been very well documented in a number of academic and popular accounts (McIntosh and Leverette, 2008). In terms of the personal preparedness literature, there has recently been an explosion in films, graphic novels and other media depicting a fictional ‘zombie apocalypse’, that is, rather than an isolated or localized outbreak of zombies, a catastrophic event that brings the status of the survival of humanity into question occurs. The films 28 days Later (2002), Shaun of the Dead (2002), Zombieland (2009) and remakes of zombie films such as Dawn of the Dead (2004) are examples of this genre. In these zombie apocalypse films, ‘preparedness’, or learning to survive disasters, frequently appears as a trope. A real organization, the Zombie Protection Initiative (ZPI) organizes zombie preparedness activities in the USA and there are a number of (tongue-in-cheek) ‘survival manuals’ available (Brooks, 2004). The ZPI also crosses over to the mainstream in that its members take part in real Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) preparedness and survival activities in the USA. Newitz (2006) links monster films with the ‘monstrous’ nature of capitalism, but there are globalized racial as well as capitalist themes in these movies and events. There is an obvious congruence between fears of global terrorism, pandemic or other major crises and these films which build on white fears concerning immigration (the threats often come from ‘outside’), biotechnology (from within a laboratory that modifies genetics) and globalization (as the zombie pandemics are frequently on a global scale). Zombies and the zombie metaphor also play a role in official simulations of preparedness. In preparedness exercises in the Cold War ‘zombie’ was used as a term for subhumans who would ‘contaminate’ local residents (Preston, 2007b: 149). The zombie metaphor is also used in disaster simulations for those people who are inert, and in air crashes/radiological incidents for those ‘walking dead’ who were already contaminated. The zombie apocalypse is doubly coded in that, although horrific in every sense, zombies are not responsible for their actions and they are also completely innocent – their death is considered to be a salvation for them. More generally, survival and preparedness are contextualized against a passive (and racially coded) ‘other’. As media and official accounts of Hurricane Katrina show, people of colour were classed as being amoral, subhuman and helpless whilst white people were labelled as heroic and humanistic, as going beyond what would normally be expected (Marable, 2008). The metaphor of the zombie is a useful category ‘in play’ in preparedness. The zombie is non-transcendent of ‘race’ and utterly locked into the visceral unable to mentally escape from bodily entrapment. The use of the zombie metaphor in disaster education, simulations and fictions enables other (white, masculine) bodies to be mobile and free of the constrictions of embodiment: they are active and rational citizens and survivors. Second, there is a heteronormative discourse in preparedness concerning the control of the bodies and activities of women and children, presenting them as immobile and fixed. Preparedness as an initiative frequently requires the bodies of women and children to be under the control of white masculinity. Much of the literature on fallout shelters, for example, is connected with the maintenance of the family unit with the male taking control of the bodies of women and children in an almost Fritzl-esque1 fantasy of control and basement holding. In the public information film Occupying a Public Shelter (1965) there are many references to the fear of promiscuity and the need to maintain gender separation (aside from married couples) as well as strict racial segregation. Shelter is concerned with entrapment by the male and by the masculinist state. Additionally, the idea of ‘shelter in place’ in contemporary disaster education makes assumptions regarding substantive private property (a shelter) and extensive private resources that can be used to secure and inhabit such a property for some time. In doing so, the ‘outside’ is constructed as unsafe, insecure and wild. Outside of private property contamination cannot be controlled. In the case of the recent swine flu pandemic containment is also used to construct local and national conceptions of safety and anxiety – that people are only safe inside their own homes and that other bodies are ‘unsafe’ (viscerally contaminated). The figure of the white child is predominant in survivalist literature, which uses the child as the reflection and fear of the demise of all whites. For example, in the public information campaign for swine flu in the UK, Catch It, Bin It, Kill It (2009), it is ultimately white children who are the victims of swine flu, being ‘contaminated’ with the virus by a black couple in a lift. Here then, the bodies of others are presented as (potentially) uncontainable and in need of control. Whilst white hyper-masculinity may desire transcendence of categories, the potential of ‘others’ to also transcend categories (of heterosexuality, of the ‘nuclear family’, of the home) presents a potential threat to these notions and in contemporary ‘disaster education’ there is an emphasis on the control of the bodies of ‘others’. Directory: rest -> wikis -> opencaselist14 -> spaces -> Wake%20Forest -> pages spaces -> Off our interpretation is that the aff must defend the enactment of a topical plan This does not mandate any spaces -> Sudbury 8, Professor of Ethnic Studies spaces -> No veto proof majority for Iran sanctions now but it is within grasp. It’s a top priority for the gop and Obama’s lobbying is empirically critical to prevent it spaces -> Performance fails if it operates within grid of intelligible spaces -> By Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan pages -> 1ac chapter 1 – The Outbreak and Initial Responses pages -> Zombie represents a polyvalent cultural trope without any singular interpretation – perm is the best option to studying the evolving notions of the zombie – we don’t universalize the zombie but instead let it be. Cohen, ‘12 pages -> Our interpretation is that the affirmative should instrumentally defend topical action – that means saying an example of the resolution would be a good idea First definitions Download 60.94 Kb. Share with your friends:
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