Tournament: Emory | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Bronx Law AL | Judge: Daryl Burch, John Finch, Nick Fiori
Part 1: The Celebration
Every Sunday you sat next to me in church
We would laugh and smile at each other in the middle of service
When service was over, we would always go and get food together
You are always the one who keeps me out of trouble
We always have a ball when we hang out and nothing has changed
You are still here, and well alive
In spirit that is
You still laugh and giggle with me on Sundays
And I still save you a seat when I eat after church
You always wish the best for me
And I still wish the best for you in your new life
Good luck Naqueese
NO ONE can party better than us!
We follow each other where ever we go
you always want to see EVERYONE enjoying themselves
you have that special ability to make everyone laugh no matter what the circumstances are
you bring the life out of everyone
I can honestly say you where one of those people who have a special charm
YOU are truthfully a brother from different parents even though your name is Aljabree Adams and not Aljabree Whyche
PART 2: Welcome to Dia de Los Muertos
More than 500 years ago, when the Spanish Conquistadors landed in what is now Mexico, they encountered natives practicing a ritual that seemed to mock death.
The indigenous people had been practicing this for at least 3,000 years. A ritual the Spaniards would try unsuccessfully to eradicate. The Natives viewed it as the continuation of life. Instead of fearing death, they embraced it. To them, life was a dream and only in death did they become truly awake. The Spaniards considered the ritual to be sacrilegious. They perceived the indigenous people to be barbaric and pagan. Death has been hijacked and has become a colonial ideology of human punishment rather than a natural occurrence. Therefore,
This is an invitation for the participants in this debate round to join my partner and I, as we open up a sphere for the celebration of the dead. As well as a point to inform the cultural relation it bears specifically in Mexico but as well in many other cultures.
Na and Bree will never ever be remembered beyond an article clipping. Their deaths will never be significant because of gratuitous violence. They will be nothing to their world but just another statistic,
Forgotten
Uncounted
Neglected
Corrupted
But is this really anything new for them?
When their bodies walked the Earth, these emotions have already been introduced to them before as “living” beings, as black bodies we in a perpetual existence of death that is un escapable but today we are here for a different reason we are here to celebrate their transcendences.
Just like these very emotions are not anything strange to me. As a Newark citizen I live in a city of death. Newark is a cemetery. We are unable to act; we do not have our hands on the levers of power, like walking zombies. Especially in the political field where we must wait and cross our fingers for the next reform to come and hope something is different while our children are dying of disease, poverty, and bullets. The issue at hand is that this type of gratuitous violence is never addressed. There is never a time where we can stop and talk about why these deaths occur or ever have a conversation about the transcendence that happens after their deaths. I say the time for this conversation is now. The transcendence that occurs in Black Death is one that escapes the pain that they once used to exist invite is not to say that death is good but rather recognizing that there is a forum of escapism that exist within the death of Na and Bree
Butler explains that this is because our skin color – black – works as a source of vulnerability in the public sphere that mediates the way that we interact with society – my blackness remakes me into a target.
Judith Butler 4 (Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence page 26)
The body implies mortality, vulnerability, ... in the name of autonomy.
Part 3: Reanimation
Every day an economic engagement is made with Mexico. The Day of the Dead is an opportunity to honor the dead and take this time away from in depth discussion about money to the fact that there are lost people in traditional notions of economic engagement. On the day of the dead there are no monetary forms of transactions.
It’s not about physical death anymore because I am a dead piece of flesh in the face our society. Even in debate, language is tampered in monetary engagements rather than cultural ones. The topic is never about black people.
In the face of society the color of my skin is so indistinct to the physical end of Na and Bree. By neglecting culture we promote violence, Our political discourse of Mexico is synonymous the life of Na and Bree in Newark – just another graveyard – filled with death and chaos, this also happens to anything that could be of capital gain to US politics. Hegemony has desensitizes us – it whitewashes Mexican culture where it does not exist outside of the US.
Traditional debate makes it impossible for me to every talk about my Black Latino identity. The celebration of El Día De Los Muertos destroys our hegemonic epistemology by directly engaging and connecting with the culture of Indigenous Mexicans. Through our celebration we can now talk about this form of escapism that is created
We use the celebration as a form of transcending as a part of moving on
Our celebration allows us to recognize that these people are hear spirituality but no longer have to live in a space of death and misery
Mourning is the best strategy for reorienting our perception of death.
David L. Eng and David Kazanjian 02 (David L. Eng -- Professor of English. He is also Professor in the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory and the Program in Asian American Studies, and David Kazanjian -- PhD from the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley, his M.A. in Critical Theory from the University of Sussex, and his B.A. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University. His area of specialization is transnational American literary and historical studies through the nineteenth century, Loss: The Politics of Mourning)
The ability of the melancholic ...of Benjamin's aceclic his- toricist.
The 1ac’s politics of mourning is a way in which the slave body cans access social life within social death our evidence indicates that creates transient zones on the plantation as a way to escape suffering
Saidiya Hartman 97 (Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self –Making in Nineteenth-Century America, Saidiya V. Hartman 1997, 50-52)
Exploiting the limits of the ... desperately insufficient form of redress.
The mourning that African Americans engage in is one that uniquely engages in a double consciousness that destroys any risk of commodification but also celebrates the transcendence beyond civil society but also In a forum of sorrow that the person is no longer here.
Mcivor 12 (David W. McIvor author of “Antigone, Pericles, Orestes: Ambivalence and the Democratic Politics of Mourning”)
It is on the basis ... a hope against hope.
No Ethics challenges please my email is dmendes215@gmail.com
I check it everyday :-)
You can ask questions about the aff, 2nrs, etc.-- Daniel))
Also, To remove clutter I'm just deleting old versions, so if I update the aff, the old one will be gone. Fight me