Tournament: Wash high | Round: 5 | Opponent: | Judge:
1NC
The affirmatives Economic development is an expression of a western universal value portrayed as an inevitable and always beneficial act. Economic engagement universalizes a colonizing epistemology that reinforces the western hierarchy
Baker 2009 Michael, University of Rochester, Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development, Graduate Student, Situating Modern Western Education within the Modern/colonial World System, Unpublished Paper ,June 2009 , academia.edu
This interpretation of modernity as intertwined with coloniality of power offers an original critique of the Eurocentric production of knowledge and subjectivity, global racial formation, and their interrelated links in the history of the world capitalist system. Modern epistemology and modern economic ideology are intertwined in the relation between a subject and an object, and the economical relation between a subject and its private property (Quijano, 1999). Western epistemology “runs parallel to the history of capitalism” (Mignolo, 2002, p. 78) and is complicit with racism, sexism, and universalism. The subject-object western epistemological model that organizes mentalities and lives in the modern world grew out of the historical process of colonial and economic dominance and has, in turn, provided an ideological justification for this dominance (Quijano, 2000; Dussel, 1993; Mignolo, 2000a). The philosophical foundation of Eurocentric modernity was built on the knowing subject that was constructed from the prototype of White, heterosexual, European male. This particular ethno-cultural way of knowing the world was universalized as the only or best way of being. Consequently, knowledges and experiences of all those who are not White, heterosexual, European men were and are excluded, unless they are willing and able to acculturate (Mignolo, 2005, p. 138). This Eurocentric conception of knowledge provides the powerful justification for assuming the inferiority of all other knowing subjects who are not White, heterosexual, male, and European (or of European descent) (Mignolo, 2005, p. 139). Coloniality essentially names the hegemony of European knowledge and being through the hierarchical incorporation of all other cultures into a Eurocentric cultural project. The incorporation of such diverse and heterogenous cultural histories into a single world dominated by Europe signified a cultural and intellectual intersubjective configuration equivalent to the articulation of all forms of labor control around capital, a configuration that established world capitalism. In effect, all the experiences, histories, resources, and cultural products ended up in one global order revolving around European or Western hegemony. Europe’s hegemony over the new model of global power concentrated all forms of the control of subjectivity, culture, and especially knowledge and the production of knowledge under its hegemony. (Quijano, 2008, pp. 188-189) Coloniality of power is thus a principle and strategy of control and domination that is constitutive of western modernity as a long series of political, economic, cultural and educational projects. “The concept of coloniality has opened up the re-construction and the restitution of silenced histories, repressed subjectivities, subalternized knowledges and languages performed by the Totality depicted under the names of modernity and rationality” (Mignolo, 2007, p. 451). The critique of coloniality must therefore entail the critique of its epistemic nucleus (Eurocentrism), that is, a critique of the type of knowledge that contributed to the legitimation of European colonial domination and its pretenses of universal validation. Understanding Eurocentrism within the history of its emergence in the sixteenth century calls forth the creative inclusion and integration of subaltern knowledges and corresponding ways of being in the post-Eurocentric curriculum. In summary, the modern world-system can thus be characterized in part as a structure of exploitation and domination, conceptualized and legitimized within the epistemic framework of Eurocentrism and the rhetoric of modernity. The history of the modern world-system has been in large part a history of the expansion of European states and peoples into the rest of the world. This has been an essential part of the construction of a capitalist world-economy. The expansion has involved, in most regions of the world, military conquest, economic exploitation, and massive injustices. Those who have led and profited most from this expansion have presented it to themselves and the world as justified on the grounds of the greater good that such expansion has had for the world’s population. The ususal argument is that the expansion has spread something variously called civilization, economic growth, and development, and/or progress. All of these words have been interpreted as expressions of universal values, encrusted in what is often called natural law. Therefore, it has been asserted that this expansion was not merely beneficial to humankind but also historically inevitable. The languge used to describe this activity has been sometimes theological and sometimes derived from a secular philosophical worldview. (Wallerstein, 2006, p. 1)
Coloniality generates a permanent state of exception that is the root cause of the death ethics of war and underwrites a hellish existence where death, murder, war, and racism are ordinary
Toress 08
Nelson Maldonado-Torres is an associate professor of comparative literature at Rutgers. Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity, p. 217-21. 2008.
Dussel, Quijano, and Wynter lead us to the understanding that what happened in the Americas was a transformation and naturalization of the non-ethics of war—which represented a sort of exception to the ethics that regulate normal conduct in Christian countries—into a more stable and long-standing reality of damnation, and that this epistemic and material shift occurred in the colony. Damnation, life in hell, is colonialism: a reality characterized by the naturalization of war by means of the naturalization of slavery, now justified in relation to the very constitution of people and no longer solely or principally to their faith or belief. That human beings become slaves when they are vanquished in a war translates in the Americas into the suspicion that the conquered people, and then non-European peoples in general, are constitutively inferior and that therefore they should assume a position of slavery and serfdom. Later on, this idea would be solidified with respect to the slavery of African peoples, achieving stability up to the present with the tragic reality of different forms of racism. Through this process, what looked like a "state of exception" in the colonies became the rule in the modern world. However, deviating from Giorgio Agarnben's diagnosis, one must say that the colony--long before the concentration camp and the Nazi politics of extermination--served as the testing ground for the limits and possibilities of modernity, thereby revealing its darkest secrets." It is race, the coloniality of power, and its concomitant Eurocentrism (and not only national socialisms or forms of fascism) that allow the "state of exception" to continue to define ordinary relations in this, our so-called postmodern world. Race emerges within a permanent state of exception where forms of behavior that are legitimate in war become a natural part of the ordinary way of life. In that world, an otherwise extraordinary affair becomes the norm and living in it requires extraordinary effort." In the racial/ colonial world, the "hell" of war becomes a condition that defines the reality of racialized selves, which Fanon referred to as the damnes de la terre (condemned of the earth). The damne (condemned) is a subject who exists in a permanent "hell," and as such, this figure serves as the main referent or liminal other that guarantees the continued affirmation of modernity as a paradigm of war. The hell of the condemned is not defined by the alienation of colonized productive forces, but rather signals the dispensability of racialized subjects, that is, the idea that the world would be fundamentally better without them. The racialized subject is ultimately a dispensable source of value, and exploitation is conceived in this context as due torture, and not solely as the extraction of surplus value. Moreover, it is this very same conception that gives rise to the particular erotic dynamics that characterize the relation between the master and its slaves or racialized workers. The condemned, in short, inhabit a context in which the confrontation with death and murder is ordinary. Their "hell" is not simply "other people," as Sartre would have put it-at least at one point - but rather racist perceptions that are responsible for the suspension of ethical behavior toward peoples at the bottom of the color line. Through racial conceptions that became central to the modern self, modernity and coloniality produced a permanent state of war that racialized and colonized subjects cannot evade or escape. The modern function of race and the coloniality of power, I am suggesting here, can be understood as a radicalization and naturalization of the non-ethics of war in colonialism." This non-ethics included the practices of eliminating and enslaving certain subjects-for example, indigenous and black-as part of the enterprise of colonization. From here one could as well refer to them as the death ethics of war. War, however, is not only about killing or enslaving; it also includes a particular treatment of sexuality and femininity: rape. Coloniality is an order of things that places people of color within the murderous and rapist view of a vigilant ego, and the primary targets of this rape are women. But men of color are also seen through these lenses and feminized, to become fundamentally penetrable subjects for the ego conquiro. Racialization functions through gender and sex, and the ego conquiro is thereby constitutively a phallic ego as well." Dussel. who presents this thesis of the phallic character of the ego cogito, also makes links, albeit indirectly, with the reality of war. And thus, in the beginning of modernity, before Descartes discovered ... a terrifying anthropological dualism in Europe, the Spanish conquistadors arrived in America. The phallic conception of the European-medieval world is now added to the forms of submission of the vanquished Indians. "Males," Bartolome de las Casas writes, are reduced through "the hardest, most horrible, and harshest serfdom"; but this only occurs with those who have remained alive, because many of them have died; however, "in war typically they only leave alive young men (mozos) and women.""5 The indigenous people who survive the massacre or are left alive have to contend with a world that considers them to be dispensable. And since their bodies have been conceived of as inherently inferior or violent, they must be constantly subdued or civilized, which requires renewed acts of conquest and colonization. The survivors continue to live in a world defined by war, and this situation is peculiar in the case of women. AsT. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Renee T, White put it in the preface to their anthology Spoils oJ War: Women oJ Color, Cultures, and Revolutions: A sexist and/or racist patriarchal culture and order posts and attempts to maintain, through violent acts of force if necessary, the subjugation and inferiority of women of color. As Joy James notes, "its explicit, general premise constructs a conceptual framework of male and/or white as normative in order to enforce a politicaljracial, economic, cultural. sexual and intellectual mandate of male and/or white as superior." The warfront has always been a "feminized" and "colored" space for women of color. Their experiences and perceptions of war, conA ict, resistance, and struggle emerge from their specific racial-ethnic and gendered locations ... Inter arma silent leges: in time of war the law is silent," Walzer notes. Thus, this volume operates from the premise that war has been and is presently in our midst.” The links between war, conquest, and the exploitation of women's bodies are hardly accidental. In his study of war and gender, Joshua Goldstein argues that conquest usually proceeds through an extension of the rape and exploitation of women in wartime." He argues that to understand conquest, one needs to examine: I) male sexuality as a cause of aggression; 2) the feminization of enemies as symbolic domination; and 3) dependence on the exploitation of women's labor-including reproduction." My argument is, first, that these three elements came together in a powerful way in the idea of race that began to emerge in the conquest and colonization of the Americas. My second point is that through the idea of race, these elements exceed the activity of conquest and come to define what from that point on passes as the idea of a "normal" world. As a result, the phenomenology of a racial context resembles, if it is not fundamentally identical to, the phenomenology of war and conquest. Racism posits its targets as racialized and sexualized subjects that, once vanquished, are said to be inherently servile and whose bodies come to form part of an economy of sexual abuse, exploitation, and control. The coloniality of power cannot be fully understood without reference to the transformation and naturalization of war and conquest in modern times. Hellish existence in the colonial world carries with it both the racial and the gendered aspects of the naturalization of the non-ethics of war. "Killability" and "rapeability" are inscribed into the images of colonial bodies and deeply mark their ordinary existence. Lacking real authority, colonized men are permanently feminized and simultaneously represent a constant threat for whom any amount of authority, any visible trace of the phallus is multiplied in a symbolic hysteria that knows no lirnits.?" Mythical depiction of the black man's penis is a case in point: the black man is depicted as an aggressive sexual beast who desires to rape women, particularly white women. The black woman, in turn, is seen as always already sexually available to the rapist gaze of the white, and as fundamentally promiscuous. In short, the black woman is seen as a highly erotic being whose primary function is fulfilling sexual desire and reproduction. To be sure, any amount of "penis" in either one represents a threat, but in his most familiar and typical forms the black man represents the act of rape- "raping" -while the black woman is seen as the most legitimate victim of rape- "being raped." In an antiblack world black women appear as subjects who deserve to be raped and to suffer the consequences-in terms of a lack of protection from the legal system, sexual abuse, and lack of financial assistance to sustain themselves and their families-just as black men deserve to be penalized for raping, even without having committed the act. Both "raping" and "being raped" are attached to blackness as if they form part of the essence of black folk, who are seen as a dispensable population. Black bodies are seen as excessively violent and erotic, as well as being the legitimate recipients of excessive violence, erotic and otherwise." "Killability" and "rapeability" are part of their essence, understood in a phenomenological way. The "essence" of blackness in a colonial anti-black world is part of a larger context of meaning in which the death ethics of war gradually becomes a constitutive part of an allegedly normal world. In its modern racial and colonial connotations and uses, blackness is the invention and the projection of a social body oriented by the death ethics of war." This murderous and raping social body projects the features that define it onto sub-Others in order to be able to legitimate the same behavior that is allegedly descriptive of them. The same ideas that inspire perverted acts in war--particularly slavery, murder, and rape--are legitimized in modernity through the idea of race and gradually come to be seen as more or less normal thanks to the alleged obviousness and non-problematic character of black slavery and anti-black racism. To be sure, those who suffer the consequences of such a system are primarily blacks and indigenous peoples, but it also deeply affects all of those who appear as colored or close to darkness. In short, this system of symbolic representations, the material conditions that in part produce and continue to legitimate it, and the existential dynamics that occur therein (which are also at the same time derivative and constitutive of such a context) are part of a process that naturalizes the non-ethics or death ethics of war. Sub-ontological difference is the result of such naturalization and is legitimized through the idea of race. In such a world, ontology collapses into a Manicheanism, as Fanon suggested."
The alternative is the epistemic struggle that seeks the death of the American Man
Epistemic and semiotic struggle key to solve war culture and propel decoloniality
Torres 5
Nelson Maldonado-Torres is an associate professor of comparative literature at Rutgers “Decolonization and the New Identitarian Logics after September 11,” Radical Philosophy Review 8, n. 1 (2005): 35-67.
Inspired by these Fanonian insights l have articulated elsewhere the idea of a weak utopian project as bringing about the Death of European Man.67 I think that the peculiar intricacies between "estadounidense" patriotism, Eurocentrism, the propensity to war, and the continued subordination of the theoretical contributions of peoples from the south call for a reformulation of this idea.68 Today, after the post- 1989 and post-September 11 patriotism we shall call more directly simply for the Death of American Man.6 By American Man I mean a concept or figure, a particular way of being-in-the-world, the very subject of an episteme that gives continuity to an imperial order of things under the rubrics of liberty and the idea of a Manifest Destiny that needs to be accomplished. American Man and its predecessor and still companion European Man are unified under an even more abstract concept, Imperial Man. Imperial gestures and types of behavior are certainly not unique to Europe or "America." A radical critique and denunciation of Latin American Man, and of ethno-class continental Man in general, is what 1 aim at in my critique. "Man," here, refers to an ideal of humanity, and not to concrete human beings. It is that ideal which must die in order for the human to be born. It should be clear that what I call for and defend here is epistemological and semiotic struggle, which takes the form of critical analysis and the invention and sharing of ideas that allow humans to preserve their humanity. A subversive act is that which helps us to deflate imperial and continental concepts of Man, such as referring to "Americans" in a way that designates their own particular provinciality rather than by a concept through which they appropriate the whole extent of the so-called "New World." Popular culture in the u_s. has picked up on many Spanish words and phrases (such as "Ay Caramba,.. "Hasta Ia vista, baby," and several others), but "" has failed to adopt the central one (perhaps because Latin@s have not insisted on it enough): "estadounidense." "Estadounidense" is one of the most important words that U.S. Americans learn from Spanish. It could be considered one of the most precious gifts (not an imperial but a decolonial one) from Spanish and Hispanic culture to the Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture that Huntington reifies and s e e k s to protect. As I have argued elsewhere, unfortunately, reception of gifts and hospitality are two fundamental modes of humanity that those who occupy and assume the position of Master most resist. Indeed, the reception or resistance of decolonizing gifts provides a measure of the presence of coloniality. Before being a challenge, Latin@s in this country have been colonized and racialzed subjects as well as collaborators in different forms of racialization. Many Latin@s, especially conservative ones, desire the American and Americano Dream most often they desire it until they realize that it turns into a nightmare, both for oth ers and for themselves. While the culturalist-nationalist response to the Americana Dream consists in taking away the possibility of dreaming this dream in Spanish, a decolonial response rather abandons the very idea of the American or Americana Dream and offers as a gift the possibility for the Anglo-Saxon U . S . American to dream the "estadounidense" dream-a dream that does not have anything to do about speaking one language or another, but about learning from others basic ideas about how to conceive of oneself, in this case, to see oneself as a nation-in-relation rather than as a continental being.71
Acts of epistemic disobedience uncover the invisible violence of modernity and create the space for the perspective and epistemology of the Global South
Mignolo 12
Walter Mignolo is an professor of Literature in Duke University, Joint Appointments in Cultural Anthropology and Romance Studies. “Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option: A Manifesto,” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 45-46, NDW. 2012.
But the basic formulation of decolonial delinking (e.g., desprendimiento) was advanced by Aníbal Quijano in his ground-breaking article “Colonialidad y modernidad/racionalidad” (1991) Coloniality and modernity/rationality. The argument was that, on the one hand, an analytic of the limits of Eurocentrism (as a hegemonic structure of knowledge and beliefs) is needed. But that analytic was considered necessary rather than sufficient. It was necessary, Quijano asserted, “desprenderse de las vinculaciones de la racionalidad-modernidad con la colonialidad, en primer término, y en definitiva con todo poder no constituido en la decisión libre de gentes libres” “It is necessary to extricate oneself from the linkages between rationality/modernity and coloniality, first of all, and definitely from all power which is not constituted by free decisions made by free people”.4 “Desprenderse” means epistemic de-linking or, in other words, epistemic disobedience. Epistemic disobedience leads us to decolonial options as a set of projects that have in common the effects experienced by all the inhabitants of the globe that were at the receiving end of global designs to colonize the economy (appropriation of land and natural resources), authority (management by the Monarch, the State, or the Church), and police and military enforcement (coloniality of power), to colonize knowledges (languages, categories of thoughts, belief systems, etc.) and beings (subjectivity). “Delinking” is then necessary because there is no way out of the coloniality of power from within Western (Greek and Latin) categories of thought. Consequently, de-linking implies epistemic disobedience rather than the constant search for “newness” (e.g., as if Michel Foucault’s concept of racism and power were “better” or more “appropriate” because they are “newer”—that is, post-modern—within the chronological history or archaeology of European ideas). Epistemic disobedience takes us to a different place, to a different “beginning” (not in Greece, but in the responses to the “conquest and colonization” of America and the massive trade of enslaved Africans), to spatial sites of struggles and building rather than to a new temporality within the same space (from Greece, to Rome, to Paris, to London, to Washington DC). I will explore the opening up of these spaces—the spatial paradigmatic breaks of epistemic disobedience—in Waman Puma de Ayala and Ottabah Cugoano. The basic argument (almost a syllogism) that I will develop here is the following: if coloniality is constitutive of modernity since the salvationist rhetoric of modernity presupposes the oppressive and condemnatory logic of coloniality (from there come the damnés of Fanon), then this oppressive logic produces an energy of discontent, of distrust, of release within those who react against imperial violence. This energy is translated into decolonial projects that, as a last resort, are also constitutive of modernity. Modernity is a three-headed hydra, even though it only reveals one head: the rhetoric of salvation and progress. Coloniality, one of whose facets is poverty and the propagation of AIDS in Africa, does not appear in the rhetoric of modernity as its necessary counterpart, but rather as something that emanates from it. For example, the Millennium Plan of the United Nations headed by Kofi Anan, and the Earth Institute at Columbia University headed by Jeffrey Sachs, work in collaboration to end poverty (as the title of Sach’s book announces).5 But, while they question the unfortunate consequences of modernity, never for a moment is the ideology of modernity or the black pits that hide its rhetoric ever questioned: the consequences of the very nature of the capitalist economy—by which such ideology is supported—in its various facets since the mercantilism of the sixteenth century, free trade of the following centuries, the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, and the technological revolution of the twentieth century. On the other hand, despite all the debate in the media about the war against terrorism, on one side, and all types of uprisings, of protests and social movements, it is never suggested that the logic of coloniality that hides beneath the rhetoric of modernity necessarily generates the irreducible energy of humiliated, vilified, forgotten, or marginalized human beings. Decoloniality is therefore the energy that does not allow the operation of the logic of coloniality nor believes the fairy tales of the rhetoric of modernity. Therefore, decoloniality has a varied range of manifestations—some undesirable, such as those that Washington today describes as “terrorists”—and decolonial thinking is, then, thinking that de-links and opens (de-linking and opening in the title come from here) to the possibilities hidden (colonized and discredited, such as the traditional, barbarian, primitive, mystic, etc.) by the modern rationality that is mounted and enclosed by categories of Greek, Latin, and the six modern imperial European languages.
Only interrogation of the representations and practices of coloniality can address power structures and how power is applied. their claims to “objectivity” act to disguise their representation of the Other from a colonial perspective.
Anand 07—Reader, IR, U Westminster. PhD, politics, Bristol (Dibyesh, Western Colonial Representations of the Other, http://staff.bath.ac.uk/ecsda/DAnandNPSArticleMar07.pdf)
Within the context of European imperialism, the issue of the representation of natives was often considered as belonging to the realm of scientific objective ethnography, journalistic commentaries, or fiction (Spurr 1993). A clear boundary was said to exist between fiction and nonfiction writing. It was presumed that, unlike fiction, nonfiction writing such as literary and popular journalism, exploration and travel writings, memoirs of colonial officials, and so on are unmediated by the consciously aesthetic requirements of imaginative literature. Emphasis was on the recording of observed facts. However, as argued by scholars from fields as diverse as postcolonial theory (Bhabha 1983; McClintock 1995; Said 1978; Shohat 1995; Spurr 1993), anthropology (Clifford 1988; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Fabian 1990; Van Maanen 1995), and international relations (Campbell 1998b; Doty 1996b; Weldes et al. 1999), such views are no longer tenable. Starting with Said (1978) the enterprise of postcolonial theory has unpacked the notion of neutral academic expertise and highlighted how Western knowledge and representations of the non - Western world are neither innocent nor based on some preexisting “reality” but implicated in the West’s will to power and its imperial adventures. The image of a scientific, apolitical, dis interested, knowledge - seeking “gentleman” braving all odds to study non - Western cultures has been revealed as hollow. The mask of objectivity in the colonial discourse hid relations of inequality and domination. Fiction as well as nonfiction writings were permeated with various strategies of representation. These were not epiphenomenal but central to the ways in which the Other was sought to be known. What Kabbani points out about travel writing holds true for nonfictional writings in general: during imperialism, it ultimately produced “a communal image of the East,” which “sustained a political structure and was sustained by it” (1986, 10). Various forms of representing the non - West — visual (films, television, photographs, paintings, advertisements, and so on) as well as textual (such as fiction, travelogue, journalism, ethnography, and anthropology) — were closely linked to the production of imperial encounters. Asymmetry of productive power is a common trait shared by these encounters. The contemporary neocolonial world too “bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social within the modern world order” (Bhabha 1994, 171). It is not only the rep- resented (here the colonized, the third world, the South) who are subjects of and subjected to the process; even the representer (the colonizer, the first world, the West) is constructed by representational practices. This in no way implies similar experiences for the colonizer and the colonized (the representer and the represented). It only indicates that though everyone is subjected to representational practices, the impact differs according to the existing power relations. To illustrate this point, while both the West and Tibetans are subjects of Exotica Tibet, and the latter are not mere victims but exercise their agency through creative negotiations, the West does not have to construct its identity according to the perception of Tibetans. Westerners exoticize Tibet, and in turn, Tibetans exoticize the West. But while Western exoticization has a defining productive impact on Tibetan identity discourse (as discussed in detail in chapters 5 and 6), the same cannot be said of Tibetan exoticization of the West. This reflects the asymmetry in their power relations. A concentration on Western representations does not deny the fact that representational practices were prevalent in non - Western societies too. In fact, historically all cultures and civilizations have had their own particular representational practices for perceiving those they considered as Other. But — and this is a crucial qualification — it was only with modern European imperialism that the capacity to convert these representations into truth on a systematic and mass scale emerged. What makes such representational practices distinctly modern is their productive capacity. Production of knowledge about the Other through representations goes hand in hand with the construction, articulation, and affirmation of differences between the Self and Other, which in turn feed into the identity politics among the representer as well as the represented. The practices of essentializing and stereotyping the Other under- lie different strategies of Western representations. Essentialism is the notion that some core meaning or identity is determinate and not subject to interpretation. Inden writes that essentialist ways of seeing tend to ignore the “intricacies of agency” pertinent to the flux and development of any social system (1990, 20). In the colonial context, we find essentialism in the reduction of the indigenous people to an “essential” idea of what it means to be “native” — say, Africans as singing - dancing - fighting, Chinese as duplicitous, Arabs as cruel and oppressors of women, Tibetans as religious, and so on. Imperialism drew its strength from representations of natives as quintessentially lazy, ignorant, deceitful, passive, incapable of self - governing, and the native rulers as corrupt and despotic. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the British officials involved during the 1903 – 4 invasion of Tibet saw it as something welcomed by “ordinary” Tibetans seeking deliverance from their Chinese and monastic overlords. Captain Cecil Rawling in a military report in 1905 wrote: “It seems to be the general wish of the inhabitants of that country (Tibet) that they should come under British administration” (in Lamb 1960, 296). Curiously, Lamb’s own assessment that “when dealing with the primitive peoples of Central Asia, the problem often was not how to expand one’s power but how to prevent its indefinite expansion” (101; emphasis added) also puts the onus of responsibility for imperial expansion on the victims themselves. This is made possible by their essentialist representations as requiring paternal imperialism — an alternation of iron fist and velvet glove. A stereotype is a one - sided description of a group/culture resulting from the collapsing of complex differences into a simple “card- board cut - out,” seeing people as a preset image and “more of a formula than a human being” (Gross 1966, 2). It reduces people to a few, simple characteristics, which are then represented as fixed by nature. “Stereotyping reduces, essentialises, naturalises and fixes ‘difference’” (Hall 1997a, 257–58). Stereotypes function as a marker between norm and deviancy (see Gilman 1985), between “us” and “them.” As Said argues, stereotypical images of the Orient’s separateness — “its eccentricity, its backwardness, its silent indifference, its feminine penetrability, its supine malleability” — have been part of Western discursive practices for a long time (1978, 4). Such images flourished to justify imperialism as a civilizing mission — the restless, honest, active, exploratory, masculine, enlightened, modern spirit of the “white man” stood in contrast to the laziness, de- ceit, passivity, fatalism, femininity, backwardness, and traditional spiritlessness of the natives. For example, Captain John Noel’s films Climbing Mount Everest (1922) and The Epic of Everest (1924) developed the “contrast between the extroverted, aggressive, and manly British climbers with the introverted, passive, and squalid but mystical Tibetans” (Hansen 2001, 92–93). Stereotyping is a simplification because it freezes what is other- wise a fluid, contested, complex always - in - motion identity. Let me illustrate this with an example from the story of the first two men to reach Mount Everest — Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary. Reaching the summit, Tenzing Norgay says he felt the warm presence of the mountain, buried an offering to the gods, and said in prayer: “I am grateful, Chomolungma” (in Hansen 1998); Hillary took photo- graphs to survey the area, urinated on the summit, and later told one of the other climbers, George Lowe: “Well, George, we knocked the bastard off” (Outside Online 1999). This difference in attitude may be due to cultural factors. But to interpret humility as passivity and fix the identity of Tenzing Norgay (read as representative of Sherpas and other natives) as essentially passive in contrast to adventurous, scientific Hillary (read as white man) leads to a reified and fixated form of representation (excluding those who do not “fit” in the image — women, for instance). Stereotyping is not about expressing cultural difference but fixing it in a pregiven sociocultural milieu with extreme power differentials. Stereotyping served imperialism at both representational and psychic levels — supporting the idea of paternal domination and acting as a kind of perceptual blinder protecting the colonizers from the discomforting consciousness of either poverty or guilt (Lebow 1976, 22). It allowed the participants in the massacre of Tibetans at Guru (31 March 1904) that took place during the British invasion of Tibet to blame it on the “crass stupidity and childishness of the Tibetan general” (Mehra 1979, 223), malevolent “thorough - going obstructionist” (IOR: MSS EUR/F197/105 n.d., 6) monks, superstitious Tibetan soldiers — everyone except themselves. We must liberate the ordinary natives from their brutal leaders — this sentiment can be seen in Colonel Francis Younghusband’s account of the 1903–4 expedition to Tibet where, after criticizing Tibetans for being crafty, immoral, overreligious, dirty, and lazy, he talks about the role of the British in providing enlightened guidance to ordinary Tibetans (Younghusband 1910, 321). Younghusband argued for a permanent settlement at the end of the invasion “which would pre- vent the Lhasa Lamas from ever again usurping monopoly of power to the detriment of British interests and to the ruin of their own country” (IOR: MSS EUR/F197/106 n.d., 2). Though in everyday conversation we tend to use stereotypes only for negative images, stereotyping has within it dualism and ambivalence (Bhabha 1983; Chow 1993; Hall 1997a). As Hunt in his study of hierarchy of race and American foreign policy points out, the Americans created for “Orientals” two distinctly different images: “a positive one, appropriate for happy times when paternalism and benevolence were in season, and a negative one, suited to those tense periods when abuse or aggrandizement became the order of the day” (1987, 69). While sometimes a positive stereotype may be politically and socially helpful for a group, in the long run it reifies and imprisons the represented subjects in their own arrested image. This problem can be seen most clearly in the case of Tibetans, who seem to be prisoners of their stereotyped images. Alluding to the real effects of the language of stereotype about Tibet, Lopez points out that it “not only creates knowledge about Tibet, in many ways it creates Tibet, a Tibet that Tibetans in exile have come to appropriate and deploy in an effort to gain both standing in exile and independence for their country” (1998, 10). However, these stereotypes legitimize only certain goals and actions geared toward achieving them — the prevalent stereotypes paint Tibetans mainly as passive victims requiring outside help. And this outside support comes at a price. In spite of commonalities and consistencies, it is complexity, oppositionality, and ambivalence that lie at the heart of Western colonial representations. Imaginative practices through which the imperial West came to represent the Other can be interrogated through the various strategies of representation involved. Though there was always a will to reify the represented, this was undermined by the nature of representation — it was not a singular act but one necessitating repetition. There always was a paradox in the Western representations of other cultures — an unresolvable tension between transparency and inscrutability, desire and disavowal, difference and familiarity. Therefore Exotica Tibet is not a distinct phenomenon devoid of con- trariety; rather, it is defined by a “true complexio oppositorum, a rich complexity of contradictions and oppositions” (Bishop 1989, 63, emphasis in original). So near, yet so far! As Žižek puts it: The very inconsistency of this image of Tibet, with its direct coincidence of opposites, seems to bear witness to its fantasmatic status. Tibetans are portrayed as people leading a simple life of spiritual satisfaction, fully accepting their fate, liberated from the excessive craving of the Western subject who is always searching for more, AND as a bunch of filthy, cheating, cruel, sexually promiscuous primitives . . . The social order is presented as a model of organic harmony, AND as the tyranny of the cruel corrupted theocracy keeping ordinary people ignorant. (2001, 64–66; emphasis in original). The following section of the chapter analyzes the most common dis- cursive strategies marshaled in the representation of the non - Western Other in the context of Western imperialism and uses Exotica Tibet as the main empirical site of investigation. Gaze Surveillance is a technique through which, under an overpowering gaze, the non - Western subject is rendered “a knowable, visible object of disciplinary power” (Doty 1996b, 11). The gaze is not mere innocent curiosity: “to gaze implies more than to look at — it signifies a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze” (Schroeder 1998, 208). Through observation, examination, and interpretation objects are differentiated, categorized, identified, and made ready to be acted upon. Objectification (fixing the essence) of the gazed goes hand in hand with its subjectification — gaze and surveillance are productive of the identity of the gazed. Surveillance as a strategy for representing the Other and rendering it disciplined is characterized by the all - knowing gaze of a white “man,” the colonial master, the West. It enables both the visual possession of the body of the gazed and an interposition of technique that safely conceals the body of the gazer (Spurr 1993, 22). Observations then are presented as dispassionate, objective facts. The gaze is disembodied — statements are made as if there is no seer behind the observations. This is not to say that non - Westerners are visually impaired, powerless to gaze back at the West. But the authority of imperial- ism for a large part of the modern period ensured that mastery and control remained a possession of Western “man.” The “monarch of all I survey” rhetorical gesture remained peculiar to the West (Pratt 1992, 201). Establishment of mastery through surveillance, gaze, and observation was accompanied by consolidation of shades of political dominance over the object of the gaze. Appropriation was done in the name of scientific curiosity, ethnographic material gathering, protection of simple masses from their own despotic rulers, or the spread of progress. British colonial and military officials who went inside Tibet often wrote their accounts as scientific exploration or as exciting adventure (see Bailey 1957; Forman 1936) or as “everyday” observation (Gordon 1876, v). Behind their innocent - sounding descriptions of travel — for example, “a narrative of a plant hunter’s adventures and discoveries” (Ward 1934) — lay the violence of imperialism. Though their gaze might be considered by Europeans as that of the adventurer or romantic, its effect on the natives was the same as that of some steely - eyed militarist’s gaze — the establishment and institutionalization of control through political rule and knowledge formation. To know is a prelude to possessing, especially if there is a huge asymmetry of power. Such asymmetry led to situations where it was perfectly acceptable for a participant in the Tibet mission of 1903–4 to say, “In fact the visible riches and treasures of Lhasa fairly made our mouths water. The Tibetans however would not sell, and to our honour be it said; although Lhasa was a fair object to loot, and lay in our power, not a farthings worth was forcibly author adds this word in pen in a typed text taken from it” (IOR: MSS EUR/C270/FL2/E/1/144, 6; emphasis added; see Carrington 2003 for an analysis of the predatory nature of the mission). Securing priceless artifacts through coercion and displaying them in the private and public collections in the West was an essential feature of Western imperialism. Paradoxically, the project of rendering the Other knowable and the image of it as primitive and simple went hand in hand with the recognition that there are elements of inscrutability and mystery that eluded complete understanding of the Other. While discussing his own failure to fathom the unease of Phuntsog, a Tibetan who is no longer considered an “authentic” native as he has learned the language of the imperialist, Candler, an early example of embedded reporter (a Daily Mail reporter accompanying the British invasion of Tibet in 1903–4), calls him a “strange hybrid product of restless western energies, stirring and muddying the shallows of the Eastern mind. Or are they depths? Who knows? I know nothing, only that these men are inscrutable, and one cannot see into their hearts” (1905, 206). Frustrated with the inaccessibility, invisibility, and inscrutability of “the Orientals,” Western desire subjects them to a relentless investigation. Veil becomes a metaphor for all that invites, titillates, and yet resists Western knowing. It is “one of those tropes through which Western fantasies of penetration into the mysteries of the Orient and access to the interiority of the other are fantasmatically achieved” (Yegenoglu 1998, 39). Surveillance and gaze facilitate other representational strategies that fix the Orient and the Other, particularly those that seek to classify, differentiate, and provide identity to the Other (and in turn to the Self). Differentiation and classification, two crucial factors in the formation of the modern subject (Foucault 1984, 7–11), are also evident in Western representations of the Other. The ideational differentiation between the West and the Rest underpins these representations. The need to articulate one’s personal and collective self in terms of identity comes from an internalization of this principle of differentiation. Classification occupies a central place in any account of non - Western people. It polices discourses, assigns positions, regulates groups, and enforces boundaries (Spurr 1993, 63). Given the taxonomizing predilection and conceit of Western imperialism, we can hardly disagree with Rampa’s conjecture about the fate of the yetis: “If Western Man had his way, our poor old yetis would be captured, dissected, and preserved in spirit” (1956, 220). While some classifications may be essential for understanding, often the classification of non - Western peoples was a corollary of the hierarchization and racialization of cultures. Classifying the Other as barbarian or savage validated its dehumanization and was seen as justification for the use of violence to impose European norms (Keal 2003; Salter 2002). At the top were the white Europeans and at the bottom were “primitive” Africans and aboriginal populations in the “new world.” Chinese, Arabs, Indians, and others occupied differ- ent positions in the hierarchical table. The nineteenth - and twentieth - century obsession with racializing culture can be seen in the case of Tibetans too where different commentators sought to identify characteristics of the Tibetan “race.” A typical example was Sandberg, who was unflattering in his comments about the “‘Tibetan race’ as ‘a weak and cowardly people, their pusillanimity rendering them readily submissive’” (in Bonnington and Clarke 2000, 209). The fact that racism has less to do with color and more to do with power relations becomes evident in the British treatment of the Irish as “colored,” as “white negroes” (McClintock 1995, 52; Lebow 1976) during the nineteenth century. Captain William Frederick O’Connor’s observation at the start of the twentieth century about Tibet is illustrative: “Common people are cheerful, happy - go - lucky creatures, absurdly like the Irish in their ways, and sometimes even in their features” (in Sharma and Sharma 1996, 191; emphasis added). On the other hand, the French traveler Alexandra David - Neel finds that dobdob, the Lhasa monk “police,” looks like a “real negro” (1936, 105). Differentiation, classification, and identification, when combined with racialization, evolutionism, and hierarchization, lead to the de- basement of most non - Western natives and idealization of some.
They base their advantages off incomplete knowledge from biased institutions. You should be skeptical of their solvency claims - by ignoring their locus of enunciation they ensure hierarchal forms of knowledge. Only the alternative allows for other forms of knowledge to exist
Grosfoguel 2007 Ramon, UC Berkeley, FORTHCOMING IN RAMÓN GROSFOGUEL, JOSÉ DAVID SALDÍVAR AND NELSON MALDONADO TORRES (EDS.) UNSETTLING POSTCOLONIALITY: COLONIALITY, TRANSMODERNITY AND BORDER THINKING (DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS; 2007). DECOLONIZING POLITICAL-ECONOMY AND POST-COLONIAL STUDIES: TRANSMODERNITY, BORDER THINKING, AND GLOBAL COLONIALITY, http://www.afyl.org/descolonizingeconomy.pdf
The first point to discuss is the contribution of racial/ethnic and feminist subaltern perspectives to epistemological questions. The hegemonic Eurocentric paradigms that have informed western philosophy and sciences in the “modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system” (Grosfoguel 2005; 2006b) for the last 500 hundred years assume a universalistic, neutral, objective point of view. Chicana and black feminist scholars (Moraga and Anzaldua 1983; Collins 1990) as well as thirdworld scholars inside and outside the United States (Dussel 1977; Mignolo 2000) reminded us that we always speak from a particular location in the power structures. Nobody escapes the class, sexual, gender, spiritual, linguistic, geographical, and racial hierarchies of the “modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system”. As feminist scholar Donna Haraways (1988) states, our knowledges are always situated. Black feminist scholars called this perspective “afro-centric epistemology” (Collins 1990) (which is not equivalent to the afrocentrist perspective) while Latin American Philosopher of Liberation Enrique Dussel called it “geopolitics of knowledge” (Dussel 1977) and following Fanon (1967) and Anzaldua (1987) I will use the term “body-politics of knowledge.” This is not only a question about social values in knowledge production or the fact that our knowledge is always partial. The main point here is the locus of enunciation, that is, the geo-political and body-political location of the subject that speaks. In Western philosophy and sciences the subject that speaks is always hidden, concealed, erased from the analysis. The “ego-politics of knowledge” of Western philosophy has always privilege the myth of a non-situated “Ego”. Ethnic/racial/gender/sexual epistemic location and the subject that speaks are always decoupled. By delinking ethnic/racial/gender/sexual epistemic location from the subject that speaks, Western philosophy and sciences are able to produce a myth about a Truthful universal knowledge that covers up, that is, conceals who is speaking as well as the geo-political and body-political epistemic location in the structures of colonial power/knowledge from which the subject speaks. It is important here to distinguish the “epistemic location” from the “social location.” The fact that one is socially located in the oppressed side of power relations, does not automatically mean that he/she is epistemically thinking from a subaltern epistemic location. Precisely, the success of the modern/colonial world-system consist in making subjects that are socially located in the oppressed side of the colonial difference, to think epistemically like the ones on the dominant positions. Subaltern epistemic perspectives are knowledge coming from below that produces a critical perspective of hegemonic knowledge in the power relations involved. I am not claiming an epistemic populism where knowledge produced from below is automatically an epistemic subaltern knowledge. What I am claiming is that all knowledges are epistemically located in the dominant or the subaltern side of the power relations and that this is related to the geo- and body-politics of knowledge. The disembodied and unlocated neutrality and objectivity of the ego-politics of knowledge is a Western myth.
Their model of fiat cedes the political and papers over personal responsibility- the K is key to developing advocacy outside the round.
Kappeler 95 (Susanne, The Will to Violence: The politics of personal behavior, Pg. 10-11)
Which is why many of those not yet entirely disillusioned with politics tend to engage in a form of mental deputy politics, in the style of 'what would I do if I were the general, the prime minister, the president, the foreign minister or the minister of defense?' Since we seem to regard their mega spheres of action as the only worthwhile and truly effective ones, and since our political analyses tend to dwell there first of all, any question of what I would do if I were indeed myself tends to peter out in the comparative insignificance of having what is perceived as 'virtually no possibilities': what I could do seems petty and futile. For my own action I obviously desire the range of action of a general, a prime minister, or a General Secretary of the UN - finding expression in ever more prevalent formulations like 'I want to stop this war', 'I want military intervention', 'I want to stop this backlash', or 'I want a moral revolution. 'We are this war', however, even if we do not command the troops or participate in co-called peace talks, namely as Drakulic says, in our non-comprehension': our willed refusal to feel responsible for our own thinking and for working out our own understanding, preferring innocently to drift along the ideological current of prefabricated arguments or less than innocently taking advantage of the advantages these offer. And we 'are' the war in our 'unconscious cruelty towards you', our tolerance of the 'fact that you have a yellow form for refugees and I don't'- our readiness, in other words, to build identities, one for ourselves and one for refugees, one of our own and one for the 'others.' We share in the responsibility for this war and its violence in the way we let them grow inside us, that is, in the way we shape 'our feelings, our relationships, our values' according: to the structures and the values of war and violence.
