Tournament: Districts | Round: 4 | Opponent: Guymon | Judge:
Ohh, shake 'til the break of dawn
Don't mean to sing so tough, I can't take it no more
Baby, me and tuxedo crew; pharaohs, it ain't my tomb
Crazy in the black and white; we got the drums so tight
Baby, here comes the freedom song, too strong we moving on
Baby this melody will show you another way
Been 'droids for far too long - come home and sing your song
But you gotta testify because the booty don't lie
No, no, the booty don't lie, oh no, the booty don't lie
Janelle Monae 13
I will no longer dance for your pleasure, be your spectacle. This is for because no one will right our story or offer you our body. We will take our place rather than have you tell you when we can have a place. Hottentop Venus is one of the first instances in which you see black woman objectified in a cage and white obsessed with her butt. Whiteness utilizes us. She is not only on display, but focal point for whites to understand. We dance for our ancestors now to reclaim our body – our booty.
Sarah Sharpley-Whiting 1999 “Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French”
Sometime during the early quarter of the twentieth century …and family.
Hotentot Venus is the originary example… Objectification of blackness feminity/body How whiteness understands its sexuality Creates commodities of women
Creation of the New World is marked by the theft of the Body of the Slave. The Body of the Slave becomes flesh, a thing rendered always already vulnerable to the master. A Being for the Captor, that rendered the body property (of Whiteness… Thus the USFG’s approach to Assata is “give us back our slave.”). Slavery is a process of ungendering the captive body (since it does not signify as human it cannot have a gender – to speak of black man or woman is to always imply that man or woman is always already under erasure.
Spillers 1987 Hortense, owns you—paradox!, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,”p. 66-69
Even though Daughters have their own …
every writing as revision makes the “discovery” all over again.
The slave is the condition of possibility for the capitalist system of value. The nonvalue the fungibility of the slave – the commodity that speaks – is the disavowed possibility that creates the system of exchange. Sections off reproduction from production falsely, the commodity reproduces itself and then is severed from its trace of maternity.
Moten 2003 Fred, Prof. English @ Duke, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, p. 16-7
Leopoldina Fortunati puts it this way…
whose birth is characterized by an ancient pre-maturity.17
The politics of commodification that beings with the female slave subtends the politics of the United States in relation to Latin America. Fungibility begins with the slave but the settler logic of expansion spreads even into the normative readings of the resolution
THORBURN representative of the WORKERS PARTY, USA 2k04
Michael-; “US Imperialism, Hands Off Latin America;” a Chicago-area meeting organized by the Peace Agenda Forum on October 21, 2004; published online-November 9; http://www.anti-imperialist.org/Hands-Off-Latin-America_11-9-04.htm
Economic Basis
Of course, behind all this military intervention …
- against the Republicans and Democrats.
Advocacy statement – We perform/sing to reclaim our stolen bodies. This is a process of redressing the slave body.
DEBATE AS AN ACTIVITY ASK YOU TO VIOLENTLY PERFORM THE “POLITICAL MUSICAL” instead we say no to that, Let’s embrace a form of CHANGE as a site of resistance. They have forced the Black Female body to perform in a way that affirms the US government, the same entity that has been built on their backs, we are “the mules uh the world.” By affirming the US government action within this debate round not kills the black woman but also makes her an innocent form of amusement to please white masters and black lovers. However in order to deconstruct this system built on exclusion we must use performance as insurgency.
Saidiya Hartman IN 1997Scene of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America pg. 7-9
In these instances, the exercise of power was inseparable …interaction and modes of expression.)
the performance and everyday revolutionary acts of the pained body not only interrogates different modes of dominance but creates a space for the black body to create her own politics in an attempt to give subjectivity to her. Redressing of the pained body is made effective when the system is exploited and operated against. Performance allows for the slave to participate in mundane situations to express her pain.
Saidiya Hartman IN 1997Scene of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America pg. 50-51
Exploiting the limits of the permissible, …limited response to need and desperately insufficient form of redress.