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How does one write the nation's modernity as the event of the everyday and the advent of the epochal? The laniDiage of national belonging comes laden with atavistic apologues, which has led Benedict Anderson to ask: 'But why do nations celebrate their hoariness, not their astonishing youth?'8 The nation's claim to modernity, as an autonomous or sovereign form of political rationality, is particularly questionable if, with Partha Chatterjee, we adopt the postcolonial perspective: Nationalism . . . seeks to represent itself in the image of the Englightenment and fails to do so. For Enlightenment itself, to assert its sovereignty as the universal ideal, needs its Other; if it could ever actualise itself in the real world as the truly universal, it would in fact destroy itself.9Such ideological ambivalence nicely supports Gellner's paradoxical point that the historical necessity of the idea of the nation conflicts with the contingent and arbitrary signs and symbols that signify the affective life of the national culture. The nation may exemplify modern social cohesion but Nationalism is not what it seems, and above all not what it seems to itself . . . The cultural shreds and patches used by nationalism are often arbitrary historical inventions. Any old shred would have served as well. But in no way does it follow that the principle of nationalism . . . is itself in the least contingent and accidental.10 (My emphasis) The problematic boundaries of modernity are enacted in these ambivalent temporalities of the nation-space. The language of culture and community is poised on the fissures of the present becoming the rhetorical figures of a national past. Historians transfixed on the event and origins of the nation never ask, and political theorists possessed of the 'modem' totalities of the nation - 'homogeneity, literacy and anonymity are the key traits'11 - never pose, the essential question of the representation of the nation as a temporal process.

Bhabha 1994 (Homi K. Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language, and the Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard University “The Location of Culture” pg. 141-142 , Routledge 1994)

why do nations celebrate their hoariness, not their astonishing youth? nation's claim to modernity, as an autonomous or sovereign form of political rationality, is particularly questionable we adopt the postcolonial perspective: Nationalism . . . seeks to represent itself in the image of the Englightenment and fails to do so. For Enlightenment itself, to assert its sovereignty as the universal ideal, needs its Other; if it could ever actualise itself in the real world as the truly universal, it would in fact destroy itself The nation may exemplify modern social cohesion but Nationalism is not what it seems, and above all not what it seems to itself . . . The cultural shreds and patches used by nationalism are often arbitrary historical inventions The problematic boundaries of modernity are enacted in these ambivalent temporalities of the nation-space. The language of culture and community is poised on the fissures of the present becoming the rhetorical figures of a national past

A) The Affirmatives construction of a “Nation-Space” manifests in distinction to a colonized Other- locking the colonial Other in a violent cycle.

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

Modernization theory provided post-war society in the West, and especially the US, with a temporal and spatial identity, an identity that could only be effectively constructed in a relation of difference with another time and another space. In this sense the will to be modern designated two forms of separation. First, there was a separation or break in time - the contrast between a modern now and a traditional, backward past, so that the societies of the Third World were located in another, previous time and their co-presence in modern time was effectively erased (Fabian 1983). Second, there was a separation in space - a geopolitical distinction made between the modern societies of the West and the 'traditional societies' of Africa, Asia and Latin America. These processes of separation were seen as being accompanied by transformations in science, technology, administration and economy, which were portrayed as opening up the future to limitless advancement and improvement (Adas [ 990, Latour 1993). The second kind of separation which reflected the existence of a geopolitical divide was further accentuated by the emergence of the Cold War, which gave a new kind of conflictual significance to the spatial separation between the modern and traditional spheres of world development. . Sakai (1997), in a discussion of the universal and the particular, Illuminates significant facets of the connection between the modern! non-modern difference and geopolitics. Thus, while we may wish to keep in mind that the modern has always been opposed to its historical precedent, the pre-modern, geopolitically the modern has been contrasted to the non-West, so that a historical condition is translated into a geopolitical one and vice versa. Although the West is particular in itself, it has been constructed as the universal point of reference through which others arc encouraged to recognize themselves as particularities. In the context of post-war modernization theory, the particular universality of the West came to be founded in a process of Americanization, so that as Sakai (1997: 157) puts it, whereas, in the pre-I 940 period the process of modernization had been the approximate equivalent of Europeanization, after the Second World War, modernization theory was deployed in a way that reflected the shifting of the centre of geopolitical gravity from Western Europe to the United States. The emphasis on modernization in the United States can be interpreted as a reflection of a new ethos of national purpose. Emerging at the end of the Second World 'War as the key Western power, there was a sense within the US that its burgeoning power was the result of the combination of its scientific and technological prowess, its military capacity, its democratic and open traditions and its expansive modernity. The US was the world's number one modern nation with a way of life that other less advanced nations would benefit from following and adopting. In its economic, political and cultural spheres, the US was seen as being ahead of other nations, as the nation that could and should offer leadership to the world. Its contemporaneity, rationality, innovation, dynamism, opportunity, mobility and freedom - in a nutshell, its modern being - was a beacon to the world. But there was another factor which helps to explain the focus on modernization in the context of West/non-West encounters. The term 'modernization' would, according to Walt Rostow, leading economist and deputy national security advisor, replace colonialism and create a 'new post-colonial relationship between the northern and southern halves of the Free World' in which a 'new partnership among free men- rich and poor alike' would emerge (quoted in Latham 2000: 16). Modernization would be conceptualized as a benevolent and universal process, a process based on a certain reading of Western and especially US experience, an experience in which US imperialism was erased, and this process would be framed as being necessary for the modernization and development of non-Western societies, especially relevant in a period in which many of these societies, in particular Africa and Asia, were undergoing a process of rapid decolonization. The term 'modernization' had a positive, progressive, and seductive orientation- to be against modernization would be tantamount to being irrational, backward, and retrogressive.

Slater 2004 (David, Professor of Social and Political Geography at Loughborough University, “Geopolitics and the Post-colonial: Rethinking North-South Relations”, 62-3)

Modernization theory provided post-war society in the West, and especially the US, with a temporal and spatial identity, an identity that could only be effectively constructed in a relation of difference with another time and another space. These processes of separation were seen as being accompanied by transformations in science, technology, administration and economy, which were portrayed as opening up the future to limitless advancement and improvement

Use of the term modernization is a blanket to cover colonization

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

As we have seen in the previous chapter, the emergence of the United States as a global power went together with a projection of notions of civilization, progress, democracy and order that posited a subordinate place for the societies of the non-West. The powers of expansion and intervention, both internally in the territorial constitution of the United States itself, and in a broader transnational mission of Empire, were intimately rooted in a vision of the United States as a driving force of Western civilization, diffusing its values to the presumed benefit of other non-Western societies (Cumings 1999). However, while US-modeled notions of civilization, progress, democracy and order continued to be transmitted in the period after the Second World War, and remained part of the Americanizing mission, other concepts came to receive greater emphasis. From the 1950s onward notions of 'modernization' and 'development' came to be more closely associated with the portrayal of West/non-West encounters, whereas representations of civilization and order, although still present, as noted above in the Dulles quotation, became less prominent - they were no longer the master signifiers they had been before 1940. At the same time, democracy and order were resituated in a discursive context organized around the new signifiers of modernization and development. This does not mean, of course, (hat these terms had never been deployed before the Second World War, but rather that their visibility and discursive weight came to assume greater predominance in the post-War period. The post-War origins of the 'discourse of development' have been dealt with in considerable detail by Escobar (1995), while Patterson (1997) has traced the links between notions of Western civilization and modernization. Also, recent contributions (for example, Baber 2001 and Blaney & Inayatullah 2002) have revisited modernization theory in relation to Cold War politics and the conceptualization of international relations. What therefore still needs to be examined; or more precisely, what constitutes my own perspective? First, in analyzing the continuing intersections between geopolitical power and the cultural representations of other, non-Western societies, and particularly Latin America in the example of this study, it is important to keep in mind that the notion of modernization - or more specifically modernization theory - came to be closely associated with the nature and direction of US interventions in the Third World in the 1950s and 1960s. There was a specificity about this intersection which contrasts with earlier and later periods and needs to be understood in its geopolitical and historical context. It not only provides another important example of the interwoven nature of power, politics and representation but also illustrates the changing dynamic of US power as it impacted on the Third World. Second, from a post-colonial perspective, and in the specific setting of this chapter, there are two analytical elements that can be usefully signaled: a) The power to intervene was certainly not unaffected by the societies in which that invasive power was projected, since, as was noted in the previous chapter, resistances and oppositions US hegemony altered the subsequent modalities of intervention, and this was particularly the case with respect to both the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and the Vietnam War, set as they were in a broader context of accelerating geopolitical turbulence. b) The geopolitics of intervention situated as it was in a Cold War context had an inside and an outside, since the Cold War had its chilling effect on domestic politics in the United States itself, and the phenomenon of 'containment culture' was a reflection of the interweaving of international and national concerns. Third, modernization as an idea, and its association in the 1950s and 1960s with Americanization, was not new (Ceasar 1997: 168), and nor was it to disappear after the 1970s-. As will be further shown in the next chapter, there are connections between neo-liberalism and modernization theory, as well as significant and often neglected differences. Furthermore, the term 'modernization' is frequently invoked today as if it had no history, and so in my own discussion an important objective is to highlight the historical specificity of the modernization idea in the Cold War era as ·part of a counter-geopolitics of memory. In this chapter, I shall argue that the Occidental, and predominantly US enframing and deployment of modernization theory for the 'developing world' was a reflection of a will to spatial power. It provided a legitimation for a whole series of incursions and penetrations that sought to -subordinate, contain and assimilate the Third World as other. In the process it also put into place a vision of the West, and especially of the United States, which in some important aspects was re-asserted in later neo-liberal delineations of modern development, as well as in subsequent writings on globalization.

Slater 2004 (David, Professor of Social and Political Geography at Loughborough University, “Geopolitics and the Post-colonial: Rethinking North-South Relations”, p 57-58)

, the emergence of the United States as a global power went together with a projection of notions of civilization, progress, democracy and order that posited a subordinate place for the societies of the non-West. The powers of expansion and intervention, both internally in the territorial constitution of the United States itself, and in a broader transnational mission of Empire, were intimately rooted in a vision of the United States as a driving force of Western civilization, diffusing its values to the presumed benefit of other non-Western societies while US-modeled notions of civilization, progress, democracy and order continued to be transmitted in the period after the Second World War, and remained part of the Americanizing mission, other concepts came to receive greater emphasis. From the 1950s onward notions of 'modernization' and 'development' came to be more closely associated with the portrayal of West/non-West encounters, whereas representations of civilization and order, although still present became less prominent democracy and order were resituated in a discursive context organized around the new signifiers of modernization and development. the notion of modernization - or more specifically modernization theory - came to be closely associated with the nature and direction of US interventions in the Third World in the 1950s and 1960s It illustrates the changing dynamic of US power as it impacted on the Third World. The power to intervene was certainly not unaffected by the societies in which that invasive power was projected, resistances and oppositions US hegemony altered the subsequent modalities of intervention there are connections between neo-liberalism and modernization theory, as well as significant and often neglected differences the term 'modernization' is frequently invoked today as if it had no history, that the Occidental, and predominantly US enframing and deployment of modernization theory for the 'developing world' was a reflection of a will to spatial power. It provided a legitimation for a whole series of incursions and penetrations that sought to -subordinate, contain and assimilate the Third World as other. In the process it also put into place a vision of the West, and especially of the United States,

The projection of power portrayed of the US gave them an entitled sense of superiority. The American ideas of “modernization” are all really outgrowths of what we believed to be progress.

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

Frederick Jackson Turner (1962: 37-8), in his 1893 essay on the frontier in American history, argued that the process of settlement and colonization brought to life intellectual traits of profound importance-the emergence of a 'dominant individualism', a 'masterful grasp of material things', a 'practical, inventive turn of mind', a 'restless, nervous energy', which all reflected the specificity of the American intellect. Moreover, he did not limit his thesis to the internal territory of the United States, noting three years after his seminal paper that for nearly three centuries the dominant fact in American life has been expansion. For Turner, the demands for a 'vigorous foreign policy, for an interoceanic canal, for a revival of our power upon the seas, and for the extension of American influence to outlying islands and adjoining countries are indications that the movement will continue' (Turner 1896: 296). In a similar vein, Theodore Roosevelt ( 1889: 26-7), in his four-volume examination of the frontier, entitled The Winning of the West, portrayed the frontier farmers and 'warlike borderers' as an 'oncoming white flood', while their adversaries, the native Indians, were considered to be the 'most formidable savage foes ever encountered by colonists of European stock' (ibid.: 17). Roosevelt's notion of an 'oncoming white flood' being associated with a civilizing mission found an international expression in what came to be known as the Roosevelt Corollary of 1904, which will be mentioned below. By the beginning of the twentieth century, as the waves of colonization and settlement had passed their peak, the earlier Jeffersonian objective of separating the Indians from their land, of incorporating and assimilating the Indian into an advancing civilization, had taken its toll. War and subsequent treaties resulted in Native America being constricted to about 2.5 per cent of its original land base within 48 contiguous states of the union (Rickard 1998: 58), and the violent appropriation of land and subsequent confinement of native Indian communities to limited reservations gave another darker expression to the meaning of the frontier (Slotkin 1998; Takaki 1993: 228-45; and Zinn 1980: 124-46). The reality of war and violence was customarily represented as an unavoidable, preordained consequence of the beneficial march of a new civilization (see, for example, Tocqueville 1990: 25). The expansion of the frontier, and the territorial constitution of the United Stares as we know it today, had another dimension which was also particularly relevant to the later projection of power and hegemony in the societies of the South, and especially in the context of US-Latin American relations. On the eve of the US-Mexican War, and in the wake of the annexation of Texas from Mexico, a pivotal cause of the war, notions of 'Manifest Destiny' came to circulate in the worlds of journalism and politics. John L. O'Sullivan, the editor of the Democratic Review, and the originator of the term, had already written in 1839 of a boundless future for America, asserting that 'in its magnificent domain of space and time, the nation of many nations is destined to manifest to mankind the excellence of divine principles'. It was six years later in 1845, in relation to continuing opposition to the annexation of Texas into the Union, that O'Sullivan wrote of 'our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions' (both quotations in Pratt 1927: 797-8). The doctrine of 'manifest destiny' embraced a belief in American Anglo-Saxon superiority, and it was deployed to justify war and the appropriation of approximately 50 percent of Mexico's original territory. Furthermore, as with accompanying characterizations of the native Indians' purported lack of efficient utilization of their natural resources, it was observed by President Polk, at the end of the War in l848, that the territories ceded by Mexico had remained and would have continued to remain of 'little value to her or to any nation, while as part of our Union they will be productive of vast benefits to the United States, to the commercial world, and the general interests of mankind' (quoted in Gantenbein 1950: 560).

Slater 2004 (David, Professor of Social and Political Geography at Loughborough University, “Geopolitics and the Post-colonial: Rethinking North-South Relations”, p 35-36)

the process of settlement and colonization brought to life intellectual traits of profound importance-the emergence of a 'dominant individualism', a 'masterful grasp of material things', a 'practical, inventive turn of mind', a 'restless, nervous energy', which all reflected the specificity of the American intellect for nearly three centuries the dominant fact in American life has been expansion the demands for a 'vigorous foreign policy, for an interoceanic canal, for a revival of our power upon the seas, and for the extension of American influence to outlying islands and adjoining countries are indications that the movement will continue ). In a similar vein, Theodore Roosevelt in his four-volume examination of the frontier, entitled The Winning of the West, portrayed the frontier farmers and 'warlike borderers' as an 'oncoming white flood', while their adversaries, the native Indians, were considered to be the 'most formidable savage foes ever encountered by colonists of European stock' Roosevelt's notion of an 'oncoming white flood' being associated with a civilizing mission found an international expression in what came to be known as the Roosevelt Corollary as the waves of colonization and settlement had passed their peak, the earlier Jeffersonian objective of separating the Indians from their land, of incorporating and assimilating the Indian into an advancing civilization, had taken its toll. and the violent appropriation of land and subsequent confinement of native Indian communities to limited reservations gave another darker expression to the meaning of the frontier The reality of war and violence was customarily represented as an unavoidable, preordained consequence of the beneficial march of a new civilization The expansion of the frontier, and the territorial constitution of the United Stares as we know it today, had another dimension which was also particularly relevant to the later projection of power and hegemony in the societies of the South, and especially in the context of US-Latin American relations. On the eve of the US-Mexican War a pivotal cause of the war, notions of 'Manifest Destiny' came to circulate in the worlds of journalism and politics. John L. O'Sullivan had already written that 'in its magnificent domain of space and time, the nation of many nations is destined to manifest to mankind the excellence of divine principles' The doctrine of 'manifest destiny' embraced a belief in American Anglo-Saxon superiority, and it was deployed to justify war and the appropriation of approximately 50 percent of Mexico's original territory the territories ceded by Mexico would have continued to remain of 'little value to her or to any nation, while as part of our Union they will be productive of vast benefits to the United States, to the commercial world, and the general interests of mankind'

The AFF manifest in a coloniality of American policy makers and society continuing the message of Manifest Destiny.

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

In the beginning colonialism was a product of a systematic repression, not only of the specific beliefs, ideas, images, symbols or knowledge that were not useful to global colonial domination, while at the same time the colonizers were expropriating from the colonized their knowledge, specially in mining, agriculture, engineering, as well as their products and work. The repression fell, above all, over the modes of knowing, of producing knowledge, of producing perspectives, images and systems of images, symbols, modes of signification, over the resources, patterns, and instruments of formalized and objectivised expression, intellectual or visual. It was followed by the imposition of the use of the rulers' own patterns of expression, and of their beliefs and images with reference to the supernatural. These beliefs and images served not only to impede the cultural production of the dominated, but also as a very efficient means of social and cultural control, when the immediate repression ceased to be constant and systematic.

Quijano 2007 (Aníbal, PhD National University of San Marcos Peru, “COLONIALITY AND MODERNITY/RATIONALITY,” Cultural Studies, volume: 21, 1, pg. 169,JC)

colonialism was a product of a systematic repression, not only of the specific beliefs, ideas, images, symbols or knowledge that were not useful to global colonial domination the colonizers were expropriating from the colonized their knowledge The repression fell, above all, over the modes of knowing, of producing knowledge, of producing perspectives, images and systems of images, instruments of expression, intellectual or visual It was followed by the imposition of the use of the rulers' own patterns of expression, and beliefs These beliefs and images served to impede the cultural production of the dominated, but also as a very efficient means of social and cultural control

The assumed cultural norms of economic engagement entrenches a universal market aesthetic reenacting a pattern of domination inherent in colonial thought.

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

The category of the coloniality of power is not, of course, without its defects. But it has fewer than others, as well as having some local and global additional advantages. So let the coloniality of power be taken in my essay for what it is: a hypothesis designed to grapple with hierarchy based on what Quijano terms the 'social classification of the world's population around the idea of race'. The racial axis of mestizaje in Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera, of peasants in Martinez's poem, 'Shoes', and of caste in Roy's The God of Small Things have colonial origins in the Americas and South Asia, but Anzalduia, Martinez, and Roy suggest that race, peasantry, and caste have proven to be more durable in our so-called postcolonial world.

Saldívar 07 (Jose David, Professor of Ethnic Studies @ UC Berkeley, “Unsettling Race, Coloniality, and Caste,” Cultural Studies, volume: 21, pg. 346-7, MCJC)

the coloniality of power is not without its defects. let the coloniality of power be a hypothesis designed to grapple with hierarchy based on what Quijano terms the 'social classification The racial axis of mestizaje suggest that race, peasantry, and caste have proven to be more durable in our so-called postcolonial world.

Capitalist motives perpetuate coloniality and the exclusion that it produces.

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

These questions are provoked by Arendt's brilliant suggestiveness, for her writing symptomatically performs the perplexities she evokes. Having brought close together the unique meaning and the causal agent, she says that the 'invisible actor' is an 'invention arising from a mental perplexity' corresponding to no real experience.47 It is this distancing of the signified, this anxious fantasm or simulacrum - in the place of the author - that, according to Arendt, indicates most clearly the political nature of history. The sign of the political is, moreover, not invested in 'the character of the story itself but only [in] the mode in which it came into existence'.48 So it is the realm of representation and the process of signification that constitutes the space of the political. What is temporal in the mode of existence of the political? Here Arendt resorts to a form of repetition to resolve the ambivalence of her argument. The 'reification' of the agent can only occur, she writes, through 'a kind of repetition, the imitation of mimesis, which according to Aristotle prevails in all arts but is actually appropriate to the drama'.49This repetition of the agent, reified in the liberal vision of togetherness, is quite different from my sense of the contingent agency for our postcolonial age. The reasons for this are not difficult to find. Arendt's belief in the revelatory qualities of Aristotelian mimesis are grounded in a notion of t:ommunity, or the public sphere, that is largely consensual: 'where people are with others and neither for nor against them - that is sheer human togetherness'.50 When people are passionately for or against one another, then human togetherness is lost as they deny the fullness of Aristotelian mimetic time. Arendt's form of social mimesis does not deal with social marginality as a product of the liberal State, which can, if articulated, reveal the limitations of its common sense (inter-est) of society from the perspective of minorities or the marginalized. Social violence is, for Arendt, the denial of the disclosure of agency, the point at which 'speech becomes "mere talk", simply one more means towards the end'. My concern is with other articulations of human togetherness, as they are related to cultural difference and discrimination. For instance, human togetherness may come to represent the forces of hegemonic authority; or a solidarity founded in victimization and suffering may, implacably, sometimes violently, become bound against oppression; or a subaltern or minority agency may attempt to interrogate and rearticulate the 'interest' of society that marginalizes its interests. These discourses of cultural dissent and social antagonism cannot find their agents in Arendt's Aristotelian mimesis. In the process I've described as the return of the subject, there is an agency that seeks revision and reinscription: the attempt to renegotiate the third locus, the intersubjective realm. The repetition of the iterative, the activity of the time-lag, is not so much arbitrary as interruptive, a closure that is not conclusion but a liminal interrogation outside the sentence.

Bhabha 1994 (Homi K. Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language, and the Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard University “The location of Culture” pg. 190-191) Routledge 1994

the 'invisible actor' is an 'invention arising from a mental perplexity' corresponding to no real experience. this anxious fantasm indicates most clearly the political nature of history So it is the realm of representation and the process of signification that constitutes the space of the political The 'reification' of the agent can only occur, she writes, through 'a kind of repetition, the imitation of mimesis, which according to Aristotle prevails in all arts but is actually appropriate to the drama'. This repetition of the agent, reified in the liberal vision of togetherness, is quite different from my sense of the contingent agency for our postcolonial age. The reasons for this are not difficult to find 'where people are with others and neither for nor against them - that is sheer human togetherness' Arendt's form of social mimesis does not deal with social marginality as a product of the liberal State, which , reveal the limitations of its common sense of society from the perspective of minorities or the marginalized. Social violence is he denial of the disclosure of agency My concern is with other articulations of human togetherness, as they are related to cultural difference and discrimination human togetherness represent the forces of hegemonic authority; or a solidarity founded in victimization and suffering may, implacably, sometimes violently, become bound against oppression; or a subaltern or minority agency may attempt to interrogate and rearticulate the 'interest' of society that marginalizes its interests. These discourses of cultural dissent and social antagonism

Economic Engagement “towards” other countries is an act violent social mimesis, re-speaking the colonial position.

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

Coloniality is different from colonialism. Colonialism denotes a political and economic relation in which the sovereignty of a nation or a people rests on the power of another nation, which makes such nation an empire. Coloniality, instead, refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations. 14 Thus, coloniality survives colonialism. It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breath coloniality all the time and everyday. Coloniality is not simply the aftermath or the residual form of any given form of colonial relation. Coloniality emerges in a particular socio-historical setting, that of the discovery and conquest of the Americas.15 For it was in the context of this massive colonial enterprise, the more widespread and ambitious in the history of humankind yet, that capitalism, an already existing form of economic relation, became tied with forms of domination and subordination that were central to maintaining colonial control first in the Americas, and then elsewhere. Coloniality refers, first and foremost, to the two axes of power that became operative and defined the spatio-temporal matrix of what was called America.

Maldonado-Torres 07 (Nelson, “On the Coloniality of Being,” Cultural Studies, volume: 21, pg. 243, MCJC)

Coloniality is different from colonialism Colonialism denotes a political and economic relation in which the sovereignty of a nation or a people rests on the power of another nation Coloniality, instead, refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations coloniality survives colonialism. It is maintained alive in books, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many aspects of our modern experience Coloniality is not simply the aftermath or the residual form of any given form of colonial relation. Coloniality emerges in a particular socio-historical setting, that of the discovery and conquest of the Americas. For it was in the context of this massive colonial enterprise that capitalism became tied with forms of domination and subordination that were central to maintaining colonial control first in the Americas Coloniality refers, to the two axes of power that became operative and defined the spatio-temporal matrix of what was called America.

Coloniality frames the way that we function.

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

In a recent work, Arturo Escobar (2003) makes the argument for the need to take seriously the epistemic force of local histories and the need to think theory through the political praxis of subaltern groups. What such argument points to is not the incorporation or inclusion of the histories, praxis, and 'other' thought of subaltern groups as new objects of study — a kind of critical cultural studies of the other. Rather and as I have argued here, it suggests the building of new places and new communities of thought, interpretation, and intervention that seek to generate and build intersections among critical forms of decolonial thought and political-epistemic projects grounded in the histories and lived experiences of coloniality — what we might instead refer to as cultural studies 'others' or a cultural studies of decolonial orientation. Of course the issue is much deeper than the naming or conceptualization of spaces and places of critical thought. As I have attempted to make clear here, it is an issue grounded in the ways coloniality and the geopolitics of knowledge have worked to enable modernity as the 'civilization' project of the West, a project that has systematically worked to subordinate and negate 'other' frames, 'other' knowledges, and 'other' subjects and thinkers. The location of critical thought and the meta-narratives that have directed it within this project, including that critical thought associated with the Left in Latin America, is demonstrative of the complexity of the problem and its simultaneously local and global nature. To begin to 'think thought' from 'other' places and with intellectuals for whom the point of departure is not the academy but political-epistemic projects of decoloniality, might open paths that enable shifts in the geopolitics of critical knowledge as well as the building of a shared praxis of a very different kind, a praxis that attempts to confront what the Afro-Colombian intellectual and ekobio mayor Manuel Zapata Olivella once affirmed: 'The chains are not on our feet, but on our minds'.

Walsh 07 (Catherine, “Shifting the Geopolitic of Critical Knowledge,” Cultural Studies, volume: 21, pg. 234-5, MCJC)

Escobar akes the argument for the need to take seriously the epistemic force of local histories and the need to think theory through the political praxis of subaltern groups. such argument points suggests the building of new places and new communities of thought, interpretation, and intervention that seek to generate and build intersections among critical forms of decolonial thought and political-epistemic projects grounded in the histories and lived experiences of coloniality what we might instead refer to as cultural studies 'others' or a cultural studies of decolonial orientation it is an issue grounded in the ways coloniality and the geopolitics of knowledge have worked to enable modernity as the 'civilization' project of the West, a project that has systematically worked to subordinate and negate 'other' frames, 'other' knowledges, and 'other' subjects and thinkers. To begin to 'think thought' from 'other' places and with intellectuals for whom the point of departure is not the academy but political-epistemic projects of decoloniality, might open paths that enable shifts in the geopolitics of critical knowledge 'The chains are not on our feet, but on our minds'.

Epistemological decolonization is key to liberating those imprisoned by coloniality.

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

It is not an accident that the conceptualization of the world-system, from decolonial perspectives of the South will question its traditional conceptualizations produced by thinkers from the North. Following Peruvian Sociologist, Anı´bal Quijano (1991, 1998, 2000), we could conceptualize the present world-system as a historical-structural heterogeneous totality with a specific power matrix that he calls a ‘colonial power matrix’ (‘patro´n de poder colonial’). This matrix affects all dimensions of social existence such as sexuality, authority, subjectivity and labor (Quijano 2000). The sixteenth century initiates a new global colonial power matrix that by the late nineteenth century came to cover the whole planet. Taking a step further from Quijano, I conceptualize the coloniality of power as an entanglement or, to use US Third World Feminist concept, intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989, Fregoso 2003) of multiple and heterogeneous global hierarchies (‘heterarchies’) of sexual, political, epistemic, economic, spiritual, linguistic and racial forms of domination and exploitation where the racial/ethnic hierarchy of the European/non-European divide transversally reconfigures all of the other global power structures. What is new in the ‘coloniality of power’ perspective is how the idea of race and racism becomes the organizing principle that structures all of the multiple hierarchies of the world-system (Quijano 1993). For example, the different forms of labor that are articulated to capitalist accumulation at a world-scale are assigned according to this racial hierarchy; coercive (or cheap) labor is done by non-European people in the periphery and ‘free wage labor’ in the core. The global gender hierarchy is also affected by race: contrary to pre-European patriarchies where all women were inferior to all men, in the new colonial power matrix some women (of European origin) have a higher status and access to resources than some men (of non-European origin). The idea of race organizes the world’s population into a hierarchical order of superior and inferior people that becomes an organizing principle of the international division of labor and of the global patriarchal system. Contrary to the Eurocentric perspective, race, gender, sexuality, spirituality, and epistemology are not additive elements to the economic and political structures of the capitalist world-system, but an integral, entangled and constitutive part of the broad entangled ‘package’ called the European modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system (Grosfoguel 2002). European patriarchy and European notions of sexuality, epistemology and spirituality were exported to the rest of the world through colonial expansion as the hegemonic criteria to racialize, classify and pathologize the rest of the world’s population in a hierarchy of superior and inferior races.

Grosfoguel 07 (Ramon, “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn,” Cultural Studies, volume: 21, pg. 217, MCJC)

the conceptualization of the world-system, from decolonial perspectives will question its traditional conceptualizations we could conceptualize the present world-system as a historical-structural heterogeneous totality with a specific power matrix that he calls a ‘colonial power matrix’ This matrix affects social existence such as sexuality, authority, subjectivity and labor Quijano, I conceptualize the coloniality of power as an entanglement or, to use US Third World Feminist concept intersectionality of multiple and heterogeneous global hierarchies f sexual, political, epistemic, economic, spiritual, linguistic and racial forms of domination and exploitation where the racial/ethnic hierarchy of the European/non-European divide transversally reconfigures all of the other global power structures. The global gender hierarchy is also affected by race: contrary to pre-European patriarchies where all women were inferior to all men, in the new colonial power matrix some women have a higher status and access to resources than some men The idea of race organizes the world’s population into a hierarchical order of superior and inferior people that becomes an organizing principle of the international division of labor and of the global patriarchal system. European patriarchy and European notions of sexuality, epistemology and spirituality were exported to the rest of the world through colonial expansion as the hegemonic criteria to racialize, classify and pathologize the rest of the world’s population in a hierarchy of superior and inferior races.

The colonial power matrix installs an intersectional matrix of oppressions.

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

As Quijano suggested above, a key element of this modern classificatory model of power is the binary articulation of a new planetary geohistorical and biocultural identities based on the idea of “race.” This entailed the process through which corporeality or body/nature was violently separated from “non-body” (“subject,” “spirit” or “reason”). The colonization of the body/ nature by the secularized forms of the “spirit/soul” is the central plot of the Cartesian epic which also is the nerve centre of the modern/colonial world (Veroli 2002). As Nicolas Veroli put it, “After the rain there must come the sun” goes the old French proverb. Similarly, after doubt there comes certainty in the Cartesian epic: I have doubted everything that could be doubted, and must thus come to the conclusion that the only thing I cannot doubt is my own existence as the one who doubts. But who am I? The inquiry must turn from the question of existence to that of identity: what is this “I” that doubts? The theoretical task, henceforth, is that of constituting the cogito, the subject, as a purely homogeneous substance that will contain no trace of alterity. “I” must be “I” and not another. Since, as it turns out, I can only be (with absolute certainty) a thing that thinks, a thinking thing, that is, the opposite of a material or extended thing, corporeality will be the stand-in for alterity, for the threat of heterogeneity. (ibid: 5) The implication of this binary separation is that it embodies a radical view which did not only ascribe the values of certainty and uncertainty on the mind and body/nature respectively; it also became the model on which to organize and classify the world in scales, scopes, meters, graphs and the usual allochthonous hierarchies and cartographies of mind, bio-culture and space. Additionally, the shift from the questions of existence6 to that of “identity” not only marked the move to a ceteris paribus7 conception of spaces, persons and peoplehood but also serves as the foundation of what Foucault described as disciplinary power and bio-politics. The classification and reclassification of the planet’s population based on this Cartesian split between mind and body came to represent the foundational binary principle that was used to organize and manage bodies, spaces and cultures. Martin Heidegger argued in his book on Nietzsche that …when it (the Cartesian cogito) is nonetheless thought through in its metaphysical import and measured according to the breath of its metaphysical project, then it is the first resolute step through which modern machine technology, and along with it the modern world and modern mankind, became metaphysically possible for the first time. (Heidegger 1982: 116) Quijano argues that without the “expulsion of the body from the realm of the spirit” the notion of “race” in its modern sense would not have been possible. The notion of “inferior races” relies on the treatment of these inferior races as “objects” of study, “correction,” domination, exploitation and discrimination precisely because they are not “subjects” or “rational subjects.” This lack of “rationality” is seen as the defining quality of those races who like the natural world represents as Georg Simmel put it, the personification of those irrational, instinctive, sovereign traits and impulses which aim at determining the mode of life from within” (Simmel 1964: 413). It is then understandable why Thomas Jefferson wrote in his book Notes on the State of Virginia (1781) that in the faculties of memory and imagination the “Negro” appears to be equal to “whites.” But that when it comes to reason and rationality they (Negroes) are inferior since none can be found capable of “tracing or comprehending the investigations of Euclid.” However, Jefferson argues that these reason-challenged Negroes “are more generally gifted than whites with accurate ears for tune and time” (Levine 1978: 4). In other words, “Negroes” and the “others,” alongside the natural world, came to be seen as blank or empty mental and physical spaces without history, or perhaps, “raw materials” subjected to “gardening,” “design,” “cultivation” and “weed poisoning” (Beilharz 2001). The extent of this hostility is easily confirmed by the fact that the modern world view sees the growing distance from nature and the “image of its origin” as “progress” and development. According to Walter Mignolo (2005:114)

Ikeotuonye 07 (Festus is a writer, activist and Fellow at the School of Sociology, University College Dublin, Republic of Ireland, “Connexus Theory and the Agonistic Binary of Coloniality: Revisiting Fanon’s Legacy”, pg. #212, BW)

a key element of this modern classificatory model of power is the idea of “race. The colonization of the body/ nature by the secularized forms of the “spirit/soul” is the nerve centre of the colonial world The implication of this binary separation embodies a radical view on which to organize and classify the world in scales, scopes, meters, graphs and the usual hierarchies and cartographies of mind, bio-culture and space. the shift from the questions of existence6 to that of “identity” not only marked the move to a ceteris paribus7 conception of spaces, persons and peoplehood but also serves as the foundation of what Foucault described as disciplinary power and bio-politics The classification and reclassification of the planet’s population based on this Cartesian split came to represent the foundational binary principle that was used to organize and manage bodies, spaces and cultures. without the “expulsion of the body from the realm of the spirit” the notion of “race” in its modern sense would not have been possible. The notion of “inferior races” relies on the treatment of these inferior races as “objects” of study, “correction,” domination, exploitation and discrimination because they are not rational subjects.” lack of “rationality” is seen as the defining quality of those races who like the natural world represents , the personification of those irrational, instinctive, sovereign traits and impulses which aim at determining the mode of life from within ers,” alongside the natural world, came to be seen as blank or empty mental and physical spaces without history, or perhaps, “raw materials” subjected to “gardening,” “design,” “cultivation” and “weed poisoning”

Colonialism is the foothold for biopower and racism – European thought is predicated off the assumption of a white exceptionalism

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

Coloniality as both a concept and lived reality provides a foundational context for understanding this 'other' intellectual production in Latin America in general and in the Andes in particular. While colonialism ended with independence, coloniality is a model of power that continues. Central to the establishment of this model was the codification of differences in ways that construct and establish a domination and inferiority based on race, serving as a fundamental criterion for the distribution of the population in ranks, places and roles within the social structure of power (Quijano 2000). While this codification was installed with colonialism and with the naming of a hierarchal ordering of social identities: whites, mestizos, 'indios' and 'negros', the latter two erasing the cultural differences that existed before colonialization, its efficacy remains ever present. Such efficacy in fact extends to the 'coloniality of knowledge'; that is, the hegemony of Eurocentrism as the perspective of knowledge, and an association of intellectual production with 'civilization', the power of the written word, and with the established racial hierarchy (Quijano 2000). In this construction and its maintenance over more that 500 years, indigenous and black peoples are still considered (by dominant society but also by the white-mestizo Left) as incapable of serious 'intellectual' thinking. It is in this context that the eurocentricity and racialized character of critical thought takes form.

Walsh 07 (Catherine, “Shifting the Geopolitic of Critical Knowledge,” Cultural Studies, volume: 21, pg. 228-9, MCJC)

Coloniality as both a concept and lived reality provides a foundational context for understanding this 'other' intellectual production in Latin America While colonialism ended with independence, coloniality is a model of power that continues. Central to the establishment of this model was the codification of differences that construct and establish a domination and inferiority based on race serving as a fundamental criterion for the social structure of power While this codification was installed with colonialism and with the naming of a hierarchal ordering of social identities: whites, mestizos, 'indios' and 'negros', the latter two erasing the cultural differences that existed before colonialization, its efficacy remains ever present In this construction and its maintenance over more that 500 years, indigenous and black peoples are still considered (by dominant society but also by the white-mestizo Left) as incapable of serious 'intellectual' thinking. It is in this context that the eurocentricity and racialized character of critical thought takes form.

Colonialism created the hierarchy for exclusion.

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

IT is MY perception that the shape of the signifying process as it applies to indigenous peoples is formed by a certain semiotic field, a field that provides the boundaries within which the images of the indigene function. The existence of this semiotic field constitutes an important aspect of the ‘subjugated knowledges’ to which Foucault refers in Power/Knowledge (1980:81). The indigene is a semiotic pawn on a chess board under the control of the white signmaker. And yet the individual signmaker, the individual player, the individual writer, can move these pawns only within certain prescribed areas. Whether the context is Canada, New Zealand, or Australia becomes a minor issue since the game, the signmaking is all happening on one form of board, within one field of discourse, that of British imperialism. Terms such as ‘war-dance,’ ‘war-whoop,’ ‘tomahawk,’ and ‘dusky’ are immediately suggestive everywhere of the indigene. To a North American, at least the first three would seem to be obvious Indianisms, but they are also common in works on the Maori and the Aborigine. Explorers like Phillip King (Narrative 1827) generally refer to Aborigines as Indian, and specific analogies to North American Indians are ubiquitous in nineteenth-century Australian literature. Terms misapplied in the Americas became re-misapplied in a parody of imperialist discourse. The process is quite similar to one Levi-Strauss describes in The Savage Mind (1972): ‘In other words, the operative value of the systems of naming and classifying commonly called totemic derives from their formal character: they are codes suitable for conveying messages which can be transposed into other codes, and for expressing messages received by means of different codes in terms of their own system’ (75). Obvious extreme ethnographic differences between the different indigenous cultures did little to impede the transposition. To extend the chessboard analogy, it would not be oversimplistic to maintain that the play between white and indigene is a replica of the black and white squares, with clearly limited oppositional moves. The basic dualism, however, is not that of good and evil, although it has often been argued to be so, as in Abdul R.JanMohamed’s The Economy of Manichean Allegory’ (1985): ‘The dominant model of power—and interest—relations in all colonial societies is the manichean opposition between the putative superiority of the European and the supposed inferiority of the native’ (63). JanMohamed maintains that in apparent exceptions ‘any evident “ambivalence” is in fact a product of deliberate, if at times subconscious, imperialist duplicity, operating very efficiently through the economy of its central trope, the manichean allegory’ (61). Such a basic moral conflict is often implied but in contemporary texts the opposition is frequently between the ‘putative superiority’ of the indigene and the ‘supposed inferiority’ of the white. As Said suggests, the positive and negative sides of the image are but swings of one and the same pendulum: ‘Many of the earliest oriental amateurs began by welcoming the Orient as a salutary derangement of their European habits of mind and spirit. The Orient was overvalued for its pantheism, its spirituality, its stability, its longevity, its primitivism, and so forth…. Yet almost without exception such overesteem was followed by a counter-response: the Orient suddenly appeared lamentably under-humanized, antidemocratic, backward, barbaric, and so forth’ (1978:150). Almost all of these characterizations could be applied to the indigenes of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, as positive or negative attributes. The complications of the issue extend even beyond oppositions of race, as Sander Gilman suggests in Difference and Pathology (1985): Because there is no real line between self and the Other, an imaginary line must be drawn; and so that the illusion of an absolute difference between self and Other is never troubled, this line is as dynamic in its ability to alter itself as is the self. This can be observed in the shifting relationship of antithetical stereotypes that parallel the existence of ‘bad’ and ‘good’ representations of self and Other. But the line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ responds to stresses occurring within the psyche. Thus paradigm shifts in our mental representations of the world can and do occur. We can move from fearing to glorifying the Other. We can move from loving to hating. (18) The problem is not the negative or positive aura associated with the image but rather the image itself…. At least since Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks (1952) it has been a commonplace to use ‘Other’ and ‘Not-self for the white view of blacks and for the resulting black view of themselves. The implication of this assertion of a white self as subject in discourse is to leave the black Other as object. The terms are similarly applicable to the Indian, the Maori, and the Aborigine but with an important shift. They are Other and Not-self but also must become self. Thus as Richon suggests and Pearson implies, imperialist discourse valorizes the colonized according to its own needs for reflection. ‘The project of imperialism has always already historically refracted what might have been the absolute Other into a domesticated Other that consolidated the imperialist self,’ explains Gayatri Spivak in ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’ (1985c: 253). Tzvetan Todorov in The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (1982) also notes how the group as Other can function. This group in turn can be interior to society: women for men, the rich for the poor, the mad for the ‘normal’; or it can be exterior to society, i.e., another society which will be near or far away, depending on the case: beings whom everything links to me on the cultural, moral, historical plane; or else unknown quantities, outsiders whose language and customs I do not understand, so foreign that in extreme instances I am reluctant to admit they belong to the same species as my own.

Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 95 (Bill, Gareth, Helen, Professors at the University of NSW, University of Western Australia, Queen’s University, The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, p. 232-234, AM)

the shape of the signifying process as it applies to indigenous peoples is formed by a certain semiotic field, a field that provides the boundaries within which the images of the indigene function. The indigene is a semiotic pawn on a chess board under the control of the white signmaker. the individual signmaker, can move these pawns only within certain prescribed areas. Whether the context is Canada, New Zealand, or Australia becomes a minor issue since the game, the signmaking is all happening on one form of board, within one field of discourse Terms misapplied in the Americas became re-misapplied in a parody of imperialist discourse. the operative value of the systems of naming and classifying commonly called totemic derives from their formal character: they are codes suitable for conveying messages which can be transposed into other codes, extreme ethnographic differences between the different indigenous cultures did little to impede the transposition. The dominant model of power—and interest—relations in all colonial societies is the manichean opposition between the putative superiority of the European and the supposed inferiority of the native’ The Orient was overvalued for its pantheism, its spirituality, its stability, its longevity, its primitivism, and so forth…. Yet the Orient suddenly appeared lamentably under-humanized, antidemocratic, backward, barbaric, Because there is no real line between self and the Other, an imaginary line must be drawn; and so that the illusion of an absolute difference between self and Other is never troubled, this line is as dynamic in its ability to alter itself as is the self. the line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ responds to stresses occurring within the psyche. Thus paradigm shifts in our mental representations of the world can and do occur imperialist discourse valorizes the colonized according to its own needs for reflection. ‘The project of imperialism has always refracted what might have been the absolute Other into a domesticated Other that consolidated the imperialist self This group can be interior to society: women for men, the rich for the poor, the mad for the ‘normal’; or it can be exterior to society beings whom everything links to me on the cultural, moral, historical plane; or else unknown quantities, outsiders whose language and customs I do not understand, so foreign that in extreme instances I am reluctant to admit they belong to the same species as my own.

Lack of understanding leads to objectification and rejection of the “Other” from a society that is familiar to the “Subject”

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

The idea that humanity is universally defined by the separation from nature first emerged in seventeenthcentury Europe and developed in tandem with the industrial revolution, as the appropriation of land increased, accompanied by the increasing demand for natural resources. It is again crucial to bear in mind that this “universally defined” split is by no means universal. The cleaving of mind from nature is again specific to the Western world. This was quite clear to a progeny of Africans enslaved by Dutch “settlers”: We of the khoin, we never thought of these mountain and plains, these long grass lands and marshes as a wild place to be tamed. It was the whites who called it wild and claimed it was filled with wild animals and wild people. To us it has always been friendly and tame. It has given us food and drink and shelter even in the worst of droughts. It was only when the whites moved in and started digging and breaking and shooting, and driving off the animals, that it really became wild.” (André Brink 1983:21)

Ikeotuonye 07(Festus is a writer, activist and Fellow at the School of Sociology, University College Dublin, Republic of Ireland, “Connexus Theory and the Agonistic Binary of Coloniality: Revisiting Fanon’s Legacy”, pg. #213, BW)

The idea that humanity is universally defined by the separation from nature first emerged in Europe with the industrial revolution this “universally defined” split is by no means universal. The cleaving of mind from nature is again specific to the Western world. This was quite clear to a progeny of Africans enslaved by Dutch “settlers”: we never thought of these mountain and plains, these long grass lands and marshes as a wild place to be tamed It was the whites who called it wild and claimed it was filled with wild animals and wild people. To us it has always been friendly and tame. It was only when the whites moved in and started digging and breaking and shooting, and driving off the animals, that it really became wild.”

Western European globalization is the root cause for environmental exploitation – Western identity sees nature as a frontier to be tamed, whereas the natives were one with nature

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

Such invasion of the human spirit, such painful process of forced adherence and identification with the oppressor’s version of the world, causes two indelible marks in the spirits of the colonised according to Fanon (1967). On the one hand, the feeling of inferiority, for the reason that even once assimilated, the colonized are never considered equals, and they are continuously reminded of their lack of capabilities; on the other hand, the dependency complex, which assaults those who have traded all their values in the attempt to treasure proof of their humanity, those who have learnt to despise their origins, and later find themselves without a home. Fanon (1967) portrays the deep psychological impact that someone suffers who must artificially adopt a language different from the one of the group he was born in as an “absolute mutation” (p. 19). A psychological mutation that must be directed from schools, where kids are taught to “scorn the dialect,” “avoid creolism” (p. 20), and ridicule those who use it. Nevertheless, the oppressors do not walk away free. Their own chains also imprison them, they will always have to distrust the oppressed, and they will have to live fearing freedom. They know that renouncing to oppress challenges their own identity, as Fanon puts it, “It is the racist who creates his inferior” (p. 93). And in this context of violence and suspicion, Fanon finds himself “in a world where words wrap themselves in silence; in a world where the other endlessly hardens himself” (p. 229).

Nieto, Ph.D in Public Policy in the University of Massachusetts Boston, 2007 [David, Summer 2007, “The Emperor’s New Worlds Language and Colonization,” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of self-Knowledge, Volume:5 special double issue, page #2 , TZ]

invasion of the human spirit, such painful process of forced adherence and identification with the oppressor’s version of the world, causes two indelible marks in the spirits of the colonised the feeling of inferiority, for the reason that even once assimilated, the colonized are never considered equals, and they are continuously reminded of their lack of capabilities; on the other hand, the dependency complex, which assaults those who have traded all their values in the attempt to treasure proof of their humanity, those who have learnt to despise their origins, and later find themselves without a home the deep psychological impact that someone suffers who must artificially adopt a language different from the one of the group he was born in as an “absolute mutation the oppressors do not walk away free. Their own chains also imprison them, they will always have to distrust the oppressed, and they will have to live fearing freedom.

Our perception of language destroys the human spirit of all deemed another

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

Coloniality of power was conceived together with America and Western Europe, and with the social category of 'race' as the key element of the social classification of colonized and colonizers. Unlike in any other previous experience of colonialism, the old ideas of superiority of the dominant, and the inferiority of dominated under European colonialism were mutated in a relationship of biologically and structurally superior and inferior.1 The process of Eurocentrification of the new world power in the following centuries gave way to the imposition of such a 'racial' criteria to the new social classification of the world population on a global scale. So, in the first place, new social identities were produced all over the world: 'whites', 'Indians, 'Negroes', 'yellows', 'olives', using physiognomic traits of the peoples as external manifestations of their 'racial' nature. Then, on that basis the new geocultural identities were produced: European, American, Asiatic, African, and much later, Oceania. During European colonial world domination, the distribution of work of the entire world capitalist system, between salaried, independent peasants, independent merchants, and slaves and serfs, was organized basically following the same 'racial' lines of global social classification, with all the implications for the processes of nationalization of societies and states, and for the formation of nation-states, citizenship, democracy and so on, around the world. Such distribution of work in the world capitalist system began to change slowly with the struggles against European colonialism, especially after the First World War, and with the changing requirements of capitalism itself. But distribution of work is by no means finished, since Eurocentered coloniality of power has proved to be longer lasting than Eurocentered colonialism. Without it[Eurocentered colonilaism], the history of capitalism in Latin America and other related places in the world can hardly be explained.2 So, coloniality of power is based upon 'racial' social classification of the world population under Eurocentered world power. But coloniality of power is not exhausted in the problem of 'racist' social relations. It pervaded and modulated the basic instances of the Eurocentered capitalist colonial/modern world power to become the cornerstone of this coloniality of power.

Quijano 2007 (Aníbal, PhD National University of San Marcos Peru, “COLONIALITY AND MODERNITY/RATIONALITY,” Cultural Studies, volume: 21, 1, pg. 171, JC)

the old ideas of superiority of the dominant, and the inferiority of dominated under European colonialism were mutated in a relationship of biologically and structurally superior and inferior. The process of Eurocentrification gave way to the imposition of such a 'racial' criteria to the new social classification of the world population on a global scale. new social identities were produced all over the world using physiognomic traits of the peoples as external manifestations of their 'racial' nature on that basis the new geocultural identities were produced: European, American, Asiatic, African, and much later, Oceania During colonial world domination, the distribution of work of the entire world capitalist system, was organized basically following the same 'racial' lines of global social classification, Such distribution of work in the world capitalist system began to change slowly with the struggles against European colonialism Without [Eurocentered colonilaism], the history of capitalism in Latin America and other related places in the world can hardly be explained coloniality of power is based upon 'racial' social classification of the world population under Eurocentered world power It pervaded and modulated the basic instances of the Eurocentered capitalist colonial/modern world power to become the cornerstone of this coloniality of power.

Colonization leads to racism.

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

Monstrosity? Literary meteorite? Delirium of a sick imagination? Come, now! How convenient it is! The truth is that Lautreamont had only to look the iron man forged by capitalist society squarely in the eye to perceive the monster, the everyday monster, his hero. No one denies the veracity of Balzac. But wait a moment: take Vautrin, let him be just back from the tropics, give him the wings of the archangel and the shivers of malaria, let him be accompanied through the streets of Paris by an escort of Uruguayan vampires and carnivorous ants, and you will have Maldoror.12 The setting is changed, but it is the same world, the same man, hard, inflexible, unscrupulous, fond, if ever a man was, of "the flesh of other men." To digress for a moment within my digression, I believe that the day will come when, with all the elements gathered together, all the sources analyzed, all the circumstances of the work elucidated, it will be possible to give the Chants de Maldoror a materialistic and historical interpretation which will bring to light an altogether unrecognized aspect of this frenzied epic, its implacable denunciation of a very particular form of society, as it could not escape the sharpest eyes around the year 1865. Before that, of course, we will have had to clear away the occultist and metaphysical commentaries that obscure the path; to re-establish the importance of certain neglected stanzas-for example, that strangest passage of all, the one concerning the mine of lice, in which we will consent to see nothing more or less than the denunciation of the evil power of gold and the hoarding up of money; to restore to its true place the admirable episode, of the omnibus, and be willing to find in it very simply what is there, to wit, the scarcely allegorical picture of a society in which the privileged, comfortably seated, refuse to move closer together so as to make room for the new arrival. And-be it said in passing-who welcomes the child who has been callously rejected? The people! Represented here by the ragpicker. Baudelaire's ragpicker: Paying no heed to the spies of the cops, his thralls, He pours his heart out in stupendous schemes. He takes great oaths and dictates sublime laws, Casts down the wicked, aids the victims' cause.13 Then it will be understood, will it not, that the enemy whom Lautreamont has made the enemy, the cannibalistic, brain-devouring "Creator," the sadist perched on "a throne made of human excrement and gold," the hypocrite, the debauchee, the idler who "eats the bread of others" and who from time to time is found dead drunk, "drunk as a bedbug that has swallowed three, barrels of blood during the night," it will be understood that it is not beyond the clouds that one must look for that creator, but that we are more likely to find him in Desfosses' business directory and on some comfortable executive board! But let that be. The moralists can do nothing about it. Whether one likes it or not, the bourgeoisie, as a class, is condemned to take responsibility for all the barbarism of history, the tortures of the Middle Ages and the Inquisition, warmongering and the appeal to the raison d'Etat, racism and slavery, in short everything against which it protested in unforgettable terms at the time when, as the attacking class, it was the incarnation of human progress. The moralists can do nothing about it. There is a law of progressive dehumanization in accordance with which henceforth on the agenda of the bourgeoisie there is - there can be - nothing but violence, corruption, and barbarism. I almost forgot hatred, lying, conceit.

Césaire 1972 (Aimé, Francophone poet, author and politician from Martinique. "one of the founders of the négritude movement in Francophone literature, “Discourse on Colonialism” Translated by Joan Pinkham) Monthly Review Press: New York and London, 1972.

the iron man forged by capitalist society squarely in the eye to perceive the monster, the everyday monster the same world, the same man, hard, inflexible, unscrupulous, fond, if ever a man was, of "the flesh of other men. the evil power of gold and the hoarding up of money the enemy, the cannibalistic, brain-devouring "Creator," the sadist perched on "a throne made of human excrement and gold," the hypocrite, the debauchee, the idler who "eats the bread of others" The moralists can do nothing about it. Whether one likes it or not, the bourgeoisie, as a class, is condemned to take responsibility for all the barbarism of history, the tortures of the Middle Ages and the Inquisition, warmongering and the appeal to the raison d'Etat, racism and slavery, in short everything against which it protested in unforgettable terms at the time when, as the attacking class, it was the incarnation of human progress. There is a law of progressive dehumanization in accordance with which henceforth on the agenda of the bourgeoisie there is - there can be - nothing but violence, corruption, and barbarism. I almost forgot hatred, lying, conceit.

As long as colonialism exists there can be nothing but violence, corruption and barbarism

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

However, that specific colonial structure of power produced the specific social discriminations which later were codified as ‘racial’, ‘ethnic’, ‘anthropological’ or ‘national’, according to the times, agents, and populations involved. These intersubjective constructions, product of Eurocentered colonial domination were even assumed to be ‘objective’, ‘scientific’, categories, then of a historical significance. That is, as natural phenomena, not referring to the history of power. This power structure was, and still is, the framework within which operate the other social relations of classes or estates. In fact, if we observe the main lines of exploitation and social domination on a global scale, the main lines of world power today, and the distribution of resources and work among the world population, it is very clear that the large majority of the exploited, the dominated, the discriminated against, are precisely the members of the ‘races’, ‘ethnies’, or ‘nations’ into which the colonized populations, were categorized in the formative process of that world power, from the conquest of America and onward. In the same way, in spite of the fact that political colonialism has been eliminated, the relationship between the European also called ‘Western’ culture, and the others, continues to be one of colonial domination. It is not only a matter of the subordination of the other cultures to the European, in an external relation; we have also to do with a colonization of the other cultures, albeit in differing intensities and depths. This relationship consists, in the first place, of a colonization of the imagination of the dominated; that is, it acts in the interior of that imagination, in a sense, it is a part of it.

Quijano 2007 (Aníbal, PhD National University of San Marcos Peru , “COLONIALITY AND MODERNITY/RATIONALITY,” Cultural Studies, volume: 21, 1, pg. 168-169,JC)

specific colonial structure of power produced the social discriminations which later were codified as ‘racial’, ‘ethnic’, ‘anthropological’ or ‘national’ These intersubjective constructions, product of Eurocentered colonial domination were even assumed to be ‘objective’ categories of a historical significance if we observe the main lines of exploitation and social domination the main lines of world power today, and the distribution of resources it is very clear that the large majority of the exploited, the dominated, the discriminated against, are the members of the ‘races’, ‘ethnies’, or ‘nations’ into which the colonized populations, were categorized in the formative process of that world power, from the conquest of America in spite of the ct that political colonialism has been eliminated Western’ culture continues to be one of colonial domination. we have also to do with a colonization of the other cultures, albeit in differing intensities and depths

Colonialism shaped the systems of discrimination that dominates the racial, political, and social hierarchal.

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The White and the Black, the European and the Oriental, the colonizer and the colonized are all representations that function only in relation to each other and (despite appearances) have no real necessary basis in nature, biology or rationality. Colonialism in an abstract machine that produces alterity and identity. And yet to function ad if they were absolute, essential, and natural. The first result of the dialectical reading is thus the denaturalization of racial as artificial constructions, colonial identities evaporate into thin air; they are real illusions and continue to function as if they were essential. This recognition is not a politics in itself, but merely the sign that an anticolonial politics is possible. In the second place, the dialectical interpretation makes clear that colonialism and colonialist representations are grounded in a violent struggle that must be continually renewed. The European Self needs violence and needs to confront its Other to feel and maintain its power, to remake itself continually. The generalized state of war that continuously subtends colonial representations is not accidental or even unwanted – violence is the necessary foundation of colonialism itself. Third, posing colonialism as a negative dialectic of recognition makes clear the potential for subversion inherent in the situation. For a thinker like Fanon, the reference to Hegel suggests that the Master can only achieve a hollow form of recognition; it is the Slave, through life-and-death struggle, who has the potential to move forward toward full consciousness. The dialectic ought to imply movement, but this dialectic of European sovereign identity has fallen back into stasis. The failed dialectic suggests the possibility of a proper dialectic that through negativity will move history forward.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Associate Professor of Literature @ Duke and independent researcher and currently an inmate at the Rebibbia prison in Rome, formerly a lecturer in Politics at Paris University and a Professor of political science at the University of Padua, “Empire” Harvard University Press, 2000, pg. 129

The White and the Black, the European and the Oriental, the colonizer and the colonized are all representations that function only in relation to each other and have no real necessary basis in nature, biology or rationality. Colonialism in an abstract machine that produces alterity and identity. the dialectical interpretation makes clear that colonialism and colonialist representations are grounded in a violent struggle that must be continually renewed. The European Self needs violence and needs to confront its Other to feel and maintain its power, to remake itself continually. The generalized state of war that continuously subtends colonial representations is not accidental or even unwanted – violence is the necessary foundation of colonialism itself. posing colonialism as a negative dialectic of recognition makes clear the potential for subversion inherent in the situation the Master can only achieve a hollow form of recognition; it is the Slave, through life-and-death struggle, who has the potential to move forward toward full consciousness. The failed dialectic suggests the possibility of a proper dialectic that through negativity will move history forward.

Colonization of the “Other” leads to an Increasingly Violent Struggle of Life and Death

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Gonzaga (GDI)

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In the logic of colonialist representations, the construction of a separate colonized other and the segregation of identity and alterity turns out paradoxically to be at once absolute and extremely intimate. The process consists, in fact, of two moments that are dialectically related. In the first moment difference has to be pushed to the other banished outside the realm of civilization; rather, it is grasped or produced as Other, as the absolute negation, as the most distant point on the horizon. Eighteenth-century colonial slaveholders, for example, recognized the absoluteness of this difference clearly, “The Negro is a being, whose nature and dispositions are not merely different for those of the European that are the reverse of them. Kindness and compassion excite in his breast implacable and deadly hatred, but stripes and insults, and abuse, generate gratitude, affection and inviolable attachment!” Thus, the slaveholders’ mentality, according to an abolitionist pamphlet. The non-European subjects acts, speaks, and thinks in a manner exactly opposite to the European. Precisely because the difference of the Other is absolute, it can be inverted in a second moment as the foundation of the Self. In other words, the evil, barbarity, and licentiousness of the colonized Other are what make possible the goodness, civility, and propriety of the European Self. What first appears strange, foreign, and distant thus turns out to be very close and intimate. Knowing, seeing, and even touching the colonized is essential, even if this knowledge and contact take place only on the plane of representation and relate little to the actual subjects in the colonies and the metropole. The intimate struggle with the slave, feeling the sweat on its skin, smelling its odor, defines the vitality of the master. This intimacy, however, in no way blurs the division between the two identities in struggle, but only makes more important that the boundaries and the purity of the identities be policed. The identity of the European Self is produced in this dialectical movement. Once the colonial subject is constructed as absolutely Other, it can in turn be subsumed (cancelled and raised up) within a higher unity. The absolute Other is reflected back into the most proper. Only through opposition to the colonized does the metropolitan subject really become itself. What first appeared as a simple logic of exclusion, then, turns out to be a negative dialectic of recognitions. The colonizer does produce the colonized as negation, but, through a dialectical twist, that negative colonized identity is negated in turn to found the positive colonizer Self. Modern European thought and the modern Self are both necessarily bound to what Paul Gilroy calls the “relationship of racial terror and subordination.”

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Associate Professor of Literature @ Duke and independent researcher and currently an inmate at the Rebibbia prison in Rome, formerly a lecturer in Politics at Paris University and a Professor of political science at the University of Padua, “Empire” Harvard University Press, 2000, pg. 127-8

In the logic of colonialist representations, the construction of a separate colonized other and the segregation of identity and alterity turns out paradoxically to be at once absolute and extremely intimate it is grasped or produced as Other, as the absolute negation, as the most distant point on the horizon. The non-European subjects acts, speaks, and thinks in a manner exactly opposite to the European. Precisely because the difference of the Other is absolute, it can be inverted in a second moment as the foundation of the Self Knowing, seeing, and even touching the colonized is essential, even if this knowledge and contact take place only on the plane of representation and relate little to the actual subjects in the colonies and the metropole This intimacy, in no way blurs the division between the two identities in struggle, but only makes more important that the boundaries and the purity of the identities be policed Once the colonial subject is constructed as absolutely Other, it can in turn be subsumed within a higher unity The colonizer does produce the colonized as negation, but, through a dialectical twist, that negative colonized identity is negated in turn to found the positive colonizer Self.

Colonialization Leads to Absolute Otherization and Racial Terror

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At the political and administrative levels, the governing structures colonial imperialists established in the colonies, many of which survive more or less intact, continue, in numerous cases, to have devastating consequences - even if largely unintended (though by no means always, given the venerable place of divide et impera in the arcana imperii ). Mahmood Mamdani cites the banalization of political violence (between native and settler) in colonial Rwanda, together with the consolidation of ethnic identities in the wake of decolonization with the institution and maintenance of colonial forms of law and government. Belgian colonial administrators created extensive political and juridical distinctions between the Hutu and the Tutsi, whom they divided and named as two separate ethnic groups. These distinctions had concrete economic and legal implications: at the most basic level, ethnicity was marked on the identity cards the colonial authorities introduced and was used to distribute state resources. The violence of colonialism, Mamdani suggests, thus operated on two levels: on the one hand, there was the violence (determined by race) between the colonizer and the colonized; then, with the introduction of ethnic distinctions among the colonized population, with one group being designated indigenous (Hutu) and the other alien (Tutsi), the violence between native and settler was institutionalized within the colonized population itself. The Rwandan genocide of 1994, which Mamdani suggests was a 'metaphor for postcolonial political violence' (2001: 11; 2007), needs therefore to be understood as a natives' genocide - akin to and enabled by colonial violence against the native, and by the new institutionalized forms of ethnic differentiation among the colonized population introduced by the colonial state. It is not necessary to elaborate this point; for present purposes, it is sufficient to mark the significance (and persistence) of the colonial antecedents to contemporary political violence. The genocide in Rwanda need not exclusively have been the consequence of colonial identity formation, but does appear less opaque when presented in the historical context of colonial violence and administrative practices. Given the scale of the colonial intervention, good intentions should not become an excuse to overlook the unintended consequences. In this particular instance, rather than indulging fatuous theories about 'primordial' loyalties, the 'backwardness' of 'premodern' peoples, the African state as an aberration standing outside modernity, and so forth, it makes more sense to situate the Rwandan genocide within the logic of colonialism, which is of course not to advance reductive explanations but simply to historicize and contextualize contemporary events in the wake of such massive intervention. Comparable arguments have been made about the consolidation of Hindu and Muslim identities in colonial India, where the corresponding terms were 'native' Hindu and 'alien' Muslim (with particular focus on the nature and extent of the violence during the Partition) (Pandey, 1998), or the consolidation of Jewish and Arab identities in Palestine and the Mediterranean generally.

Shaikh 07 (Nermeen. Broadcast news producer and weekly co-host at Democracy Now!. Interrogating Charity and the Benevolence of Empire. United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print.JMR)

the governing structures colonial imperialists established in the colonies many of which have devastating consequences the banalization of political violence (between native and settler) in colonial Rwanda, together with the consolidation of ethnic identities in the wake of decolonization with the institution and maintenance of colonial forms of law and government created extensive political and juridical distinctions The violence of colonialism operated on two levels violence between the colonizer and the colonized the violence between native and settler was institutionalized within the colonized population itsel The Rwandan genocide was a 'metaphor for postcolonial political violence' enabled by colonial violence against the native, and by the new institutionalized forms of ethnic differentiation among the colonized population introduced by the colonial state. mark the significance (and persistence) of the colonial antecedents to contemporary political violence. Given the scale of the colonial intervention, good intentions should not become an excuse to overlook the unintended consequences In this particular instance, rather than indulging fatuous theories about 'primordial' loyalties, the 'backwardness' of 'premodern' peoples , it makes more sense to situate the Rwandan genocide within the logic of colonialism, which is of course not to advance reductive explanations but simply to historicize and contextualize contemporary events in the wake of such massive intervention

Genocide and Civil War is an inevitable product of postcolonial thinking—it banalizes political violence against the colonized

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2013

The postcolonial perspective departs from the traditions of the sociology of underdevelopment or the "dependency" theory. As a mode of analysis it attempts to revise those nationalist or "nativist" pedagogies that set up the relation of Third and First Worlds in a binary structure of opposition. The postcolonial perspective resists attempts to provide a holistic social explanation, forcing a recognition of the more complex cultural and political boundaries that exist on the cusp of these often opposed political spheres. It is from this hybrid location of cultural value-the transnational as the translational-that the postcolonial intellectual attempts to elaborate a historical and literary project. It has been my growing conviction that the encounters and negotiations of differential meanings and values within the governmental discourses and cultural practices that make up "colonial" textuality have enacted, avant la lettre, many of the problematics of signification and judgment that have become current in contemporary theory: aporia, ambivalence, indeterminacy, the question of discursive closure, the threat to agency, the status of intentionality, the challenge to "totalizing" concepts, to name but a few. To put it in general terms, there is a "colonial" countermodernity at work in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century matrices of Western modernity that, if acknowledged, would question the historicism that, in a linear narrative, analogically links late capitalism to the fragmentary, simulacral, pastiche-like symptoms of postmodernity. This is done without taking into account the historical traditions of cultural contingency and textual indeterminacy that were generated in the attempt to produce an "enlightened" colonial subject-in both the foreign and native varieties-and that transformed, in the process, both antagonistic sites of cultural agency. Postcolonial critical discourses require forms of dialectical thinking that do not disavow or sublate the otherness (alterity) that constitutes the symbolic domain of psychic and social identifications. The incommensurability of cultural values and priorities that the postcolonial critic represents cannot be accommodated within a relativism that assumes a public and symmetrical world. And the cultural potential of such differential histories has led Fredric Jameson to recognize the "internationalization of the national situations" in the postcolonial criticism of Roberto Retamar. Far from functioning as an absorption of the particular by the general, the very act of articulating cultural differences "calls us into question fully as much as it acknowledges the Other . . . neither re-duc[ing] the Third World to some homogeneous Other of the West, nor ... vacuously celebrat[ing] the astonishing pluralism of human cultures."2 The historical grounds of such an intellectual tradition are to be found in the revisionary impulse that informs many postcolonial thinkers. C. L. R. James once remarked that the postcolonial prerogative consisted in reinterpreting and rewriting the forms and effects of an "older" colonial consciousness from the later experience of the cultural displacement that marks the more recent, post-war histories of the Western metropolis. A similar process of cultural translation, and transvaluation, is evident in Edward Said's assessment of the response from disparate postcolonial regions as a "tremendously energetic attempt to engage with the metropolitan world in a common effort at reinscribing, reinterpreting, and expanding the sites of intensity and the terrain contested with Europe."

Bhabha 92 (Homi, Professor of English and American Literature and Language, and the Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard University, Summer 1992, Freedom’s Basis in the Indeterminate, October, Vol. 61, The Identity in Question, pp. 46-57)

postcolonial perspective departs from the traditions of the sociology of underdevelopment or the "dependency" theory. it attempts to revise nationalist or "nativist" pedagogies that set up the relation of Third and First Worlds in a binary structure of opposition The perspective resists attempts to provide a holistic social explanation, forcing a recognition of the more complex cultural and political boundaries that exist on the cusp of these often opposed political spheres postcolonial intellect attempts to elaborate a historical and literary project historical traditions of cultural contingency and textual indeterminacy the attempt to produce an "enlightened" colonial subject-in both the foreign and native varieties Postcolonial critical discourses require forms of dialectical thinking that do not disavow or sublate the otherness (alterity) that constitutes the symbolic domain of psychic and social identifications cultural values and priorities cannot be accommodated within a relativism that assumes a public and symmetrical world. articulating cultural differences "calls us into question fully as much as it acknowledges the Other . . . neither re-duc[ing] the Third World to some homogeneous Other of the West, nor ... vacuously celebrat[ing] the astonishing pluralism of human cultures. the postcolonial prerogative consisted in reinterpreting and rewriting the forms and effects of an "older" colonial consciousness from the later experience of the cultural displacement that marks the more recent, post-war histories of the West

Postcolonial thinking requires the recognition of cultural differences, key to prevent degrading of individuals to subalterns

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Postcolonial criticism bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authority within the modern world order. Postcolonial perspectives emerge from the colonial or anticolonialist testimonies of Third World countries and from the testimony of minorities within the geopolitical division of East/West, North/ South. These perspectives intervene in the ideological discourses of modernity that have attempted to give a hegemonic "normality" to the uneven development and the differential, often disadvantaged, histories of nations, races, communities, and peoples. Their critical revisions are formulated around issues of cultural difference, social authority, and political discrimination in order to reveal the antagonistic and ambivalent moments within the "rationalizations" of modernity. To assimilate Habermas to our purposes, we could also argue that the postcolonial project, at its most general theoretical level, seeks to explore those social pathologies-"loss of meaning, conditions of anomie"-that no longer simply "cluster around class antagonism, [but] break up into widely scattered historical contingencies."' These contingencies often provide the grounds of historical necessity for the elaboration of strategies of emancipation, for the staging of other social antagonisms. Reconstituting the discourse of cultural difference demands more than a simple change of cultural contents and symbols, for a replacement within the same representational time frame is never adequate. This reconstitution requires a radical revision of the social temporality in which emergent histories may be written: the rearticulation of the "sign" in which cultural identities may be inscribed. And contingency as the signifying time of counterhegemonic strategies is not a celebration of "lack" or "excess" or a self-perpetuating series of negative ontologies. Such "indeterminism" is the mark of the conflictual yet. productive space in which the arbitrariness of the sign of cultural signification emerges within the regulated boundaries of social discourse.

Bhabha 92 (Homi, Professor of English and American Literature and Language, and the Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard University, Summer 1992, Freedom’s Basis in the Indeterminate, October, Vol. 61, The Identity in Question, pp. 46-57)

Postcolonial criticism bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation in the contest for political and social authority within the modern world . perspectives emerge from the colonial or anticolonialist testimonies of Third World countries These intervene in the ideological discourses of modernity that attempted to give a hegemonic "normality" to the uneven development and disadvantaged, histories of nations and peoples critical revisions are formulated around cultural difference, social authority, and political discrimination to reveal the antagonistic and ambivalent moments within the "rationalizations" of modernity pathologies break up into widely scattered historical contingencies These provide Reconstituting the discourse of cultural difference demands more than a simple change of cultural contents and symbols, for a replacement within the same representational time frame is never adequate. the time of counterhegemonic strategies is not a celebration of "lack" or "excess" or a self-perpetuating series of negative ontologies. "indeterminism" is the mark of the conflictual yet. productive space in which the arbitrariness of the sign of cultural signification emerges within the regulated boundaries of social discourse

Only radical change of social norms strays away from ideology

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Gonzaga (GDI)

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2013

Furthermore, and very much linked to issues of representation, a postcolonial perspective would question the geographies of reference for self and other, and their interrelation or intersubjectivity. What is missing in both Bauman and Foucault is a sense of the difference that colonialism or Empire makes to the ways in which power, politics and knowledge combine and work out their effects on the landscape of social change. Spivak (1999), in her work on the post-colonial, which includes a critique of Foucault and Deleuze, has reminded us of the 'sanctioned ignorance' and occlusion of the colonial and imperial moment in Western post-structuralist thinking. The ways in which non-Western others have been and continue to be represented is reflected in a range of subordinating forms of classification, surveillance, negation, appropriation and debasement, as contrasted to a positive self-affirmation of Western identity (Spurr 1993).8 These forms of representation, incisively analysed by Säid (1978 and 1993), find expression within the frame of North-South relations post-1989, as Doty (1996) has shown, and their production is crucial to the sustainability of particular relations of power and subordination. As has been outlined above, Euro-Americanism exemplifies many of the problems associated with the depiction and representation of non-Western societies, and the elements I mentioned in that section could be considered in a geopolitical setting as having three interwoven components - representations of: a) the other, e.g. the Third World; b) the self, e.g. the First World and, c) the interrelations between self and other, e.g. First World/Third World relations. Frequently critiques of the geopolitics of representation focus on (a) and (c) so that in the example of dependency perspectives (discussed in chapter 5) the critical assessment of modernization theory focused on the inadequate portrayal of Third World reality (a) and the overly sanguine depiction of First World-Third World relations (c), whereas the image drawn of the First World self was subjected to much less critical scrutiny, even though, it might be suggested, that representation was quite vital to the functioning of the theory, as also is the case with the neo-liberal discourse of development (see chapter 4). These three intersecting components, need to be borne in mind in the development of any critique of the state of North-South relations and they can be seen as an important part of any post-colonial perspective. How might such a perspective be initially specified? I want to outline five elements, to which I shall return in chapter 6. 1 . As an analytical mode, as distinct from a historical periodization, the post-colonial seeks to question Western discourses of, for example, progress, civilization, modernization, development and democracy, by making connections with the continuing relevance of invasive colonial and imperial power that these discourses tend to evade. 2. The post-colonial can be employed to highlight the mutually constitutive role played by colonizer and colonized, or globalizers and globalized. 3. The post-colonial as a critical mode of enquiry can be used to pose a series of questions concerning the location and differential impact of the agents of knowledge. Not only does a post-colonial perspective consider the thematic silences present in influential Western discourses, it also challenges the pervasive tendency to ignore the contributions of African, Asian and Latin American intellectuals and their counter-representations of West/non-West relations. 4. Fourth, as a mode of analysis, the post-colonial seeks to give key attention to the 'centrality of the periphery', to foreground the peripheral case since, as the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano (1983: 184) once put it, it is 'in the outskirts of the world . . . that the system reveals its true face'. 5. Fifth, the post-colonial in terms of the way I interpret it in this text carries with it an ethico-political positionality that seeks to oppose the coloniality and imperiality of power and re-assert the salience of autonomy and popular resistance to Western penetrations. This is an issue to which I shall return in subsequent chapters.

Slater 2004 (David, Professor of Social and Political Geography at Loughborough University, “Geopolitics and the Post-colonial: Rethinking North-South Relations”, p 19-21)

a postcolonial perspective would question the geographies of reference for self and other, and their interrelation or intersubjectivity. What is missing in both Bauman and Foucault is a sense of the difference that colonialism or Empire makes to the ways in which power, politics and knowledge combine and work out their effects on the landscape of social change. Spivak has reminded us of the 'sanctioned ignorance' and occlusion of the colonial and imperial moment in Western post-structuralist thinking. The ways in which non-Western others have been and continue to be represented is reflected in a range of subordinating forms of classification, surveillance, negation, appropriation and debasement, as contrasted to a positive self-affirmation of Western identity As has been outlined above, Euro-Americanism exemplifies many of the problems associated with the depiction and representation of non-Western societies, and the elements I mentioned in that section could be considered in a geopolitical setting as having three interwoven components - representations of: a) the other, e.g. the Third World; b) the self, e.g. the First World and, c) the interrelations between self and other, e.g. First World/Third World relations. geopolitics of representation focus on (a) and (c) so that in the example of dependency perspectives the critical assessment of modernization theory focused on the inadequate portrayal of Third World reality and the overly sanguine depiction of First World-Third World relations whereas the image drawn of the First World self was subjected to much less critical scrutiny These three intersecting components, need to be borne in mind in the development of any critique of the state of North-South relations and they can be seen as an important part of any post-colonial perspective the post-colonial seeks to question Western discourses of, for example, progress, civilization, modernization, development and democracy, by making connections with the continuing relevance of invasive colonial and imperial power that these discourses tend to evade The post-colonial can be used to pose a series of questions concerning the location and differential impact of the agents of knowledge a post-colonial perspective challenges the pervasive tendency to ignore the contributions of African, Asian and Latin American intellectuals and their counter-representations of West/non-West relations as a mode of analysis, the post-colonial seeks to give key attention to the 'centrality of the periphery' the post-colonial in terms of the way I interpret it in this text carries with it an ethico-political positionality that seeks to oppose the coloniality and imperiality of power and re-assert the salience of autonomy and popular resistance to Western penetrations

Instead of accepting a Euro-American mindset of thinking of the “third world” as the “other” and subjecting the non-Western countries to subordination, accept the postcolonial mindset of rejecting the Western narrative.

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Gonzaga (GDI)

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2013

Thus, it can be argued that whereas within the frame of global politics there is more interdependence, the pace of cultural communication, military delivery, disease transmission and so on have accelerated, and that while global issues of refugees, ecology, arms control, organized crime and terrorism have become more intense, nevertheless the territorial state remains the most visible and organized site of political action in the world (Connolly 2001). It is a crucial crossroads for politics, the political and the spatial. But are all nation-states geopolitically positioned in the same way? Clearly they are not; and what needs stressing in the context of a post-colonial perspective on North-South relations is the difference that both coloniality and imperiality have made. Making this connection is also part of the geopolitical. How? Customarily, the analysis of the relations between politics and the political is worked out within the conceptual confines of an implicitly Western territorial state. There is an assumption of a pre-given territorial integrity and impermeability.9 But in the situation of peripheral polities, the historical realities of external power and its effects within those polities are much more difficult to ignore. What this contrast points to is the lack of equality in the full recognition of the territorial integrity of nation-states. For the societies of Latin America, Africa and Asia, the principles governing the constitution of their mode of political being were deeply structured by external penetration, by the invasiveness of foreign powers. The framing of time and the ordering of space followed an externally imposed logic, the effects of which still resonate in the postcolonial period. The struggles to recover an autochthonous narrative of time to counter a colonialist rule of memory, and to rediscover an indigenous amalgam of meanings for the territory of the nation have formed a primary part of post-Independence politics. In what were referred to as 'wars of national liberation', the struggle to breathe new life into the time-space nexus of independence lay at the core of the anti-imperialist movement. This then is one modality of the geopolitical, of a transformative rupture, where anti-colonial movements were the disrupting and destabilizing currents able to challenge and eventually bring to an end the colonial appropriation of national space.

Slater 2004 (David, Professor of Social and Political Geography at Loughborough University, “Geopolitics and the Post-colonial: Rethinking North-South Relations”, p 23-24)

within the frame of global politics the territorial state remains the most visible and organized site of political action in the world But are all nation-states geopolitically positioned in the same way? Clearly they are not; and what needs stressing in the context of a post-colonial perspective on North-South relations is the difference that both coloniality and imperiality have made. in the situation of peripheral polities, the historical realities of external power and its effects within those polities are much more difficult to ignore. What this contrast points to is the lack of equality in the full recognition of the territorial integrity of nation-states. For the societies of Latin America, Africa and Asia, the principles governing the constitution of their mode of political being were deeply structured by external penetration, by the invasiveness of foreign powers. The framing of time and the ordering of space followed an externally imposed logic, the effects of which still resonate in the postcolonial period. The struggles to recover an autochthonous narrative of time to counter a colonialist rule of memory, and to rediscover an indigenous amalgam of meanings for the territory of the nation have formed a primary part of post-Independence politics the struggle to breathe new life into the time-space nexus of independence lay at the core of the anti-imperialist movement This then is one modality of the geopolitical, of a transformative rupture, where anti-colonial movements were the disrupting and destabilizing currents able to challenge and eventually bring to an end the colonial appropriation of national space.

Even though nation states are the most organized political sites in the world, some nation states are clearly positioned differently, which is an outgrowth of the coloniality and imperiality formerly imposed on the post colonial countries. Reject the aff-it embodies the colonial mindset.

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Kritiks

2013

As I end let me return to the beginning of my article, to the fallen towers and falling idols. What has befallen the ideals and the ideas of global progress now that the New World is bereft of its towers, its towering ladder without rungs targeted as the symbol of our times? Such days that eerily hollow out the times and places in which we live confront our sense of progress with the challenge of the unbuilt. The unbuilt is not a place, Wittgenstein says, that you can reach with a ladder; what is needed is a perspicuous vision that reveals a space, a way in the world, that is often obscured by the onward and upward thrust of progress: Our civilisation is characterised by the word ‘progress’. Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure . . . I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundation of possible buildings. (Culture and Value, 7e, 1930) Neither destruction nor deconstruction, the unbuilt is the creation of a form whose virtual absence raises the question of what it would mean to start again, in the same place, as if it were elsewhere, adjacent to the site of a historic disaster or a personal trauma. The rubble and debris that survive carry the memories of other fallen towers, Babel for instance, and lessons of endless ladders that suddenly collapse beneath our feet. We have no option but to be interested in constructing buildings; at the same time, we have no choice but to place, in full view of our buildings, the vision of the Unbuilt –- ‘the foundation of possible buildings’, other foundations, other alternative worlds. Perhaps, then, we will not forget to measure Progress from the ground, from other perspectives, other possible foundations, even when we vainly believe that we are, ourselves, standing at the top of the tower.

Bhabha ‘03(Homi K, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities in the Department of English at Harvard, the Director of the Humanities Center and the Senior Advisor on the Humanities to the President and Provost at Harvard University, "Democracy De-realized." Diogenes 50.1 (2003): 34-5, http://dio.sagepub.com/content/50/1/27.full.pdf+html)

The unbuilt is not a place, that you can reach with a ladder; what is needed is a perspicuous vision that reveals a space, a way in the world, that is often obscured by the onward and upward thrust of progress Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure Neither destruction nor deconstruction, the unbuilt is the creation of a form whose virtual absence raises the question of what it would mean to start again, in the same place, as if it were elsewhere, adjacent to the site of a historic disaster or a personal trauma. We have no option but to be interested in constructing buildings; at the same time, we have no choice but to place, in full view of our buildings, the vision of the Unbuilt –- ‘the foundation of possible buildings’, other foundations, other alternative worlds. Perhaps, then, we will not forget to measure Progress from the ground, from other perspectives, other possible foundations, even when we vainly believe that we are, ourselves, standing at the top of the tower.

The alternative is the Unbuilt of Colonial social construction, where we refuse to engage in their narrative of growth that comes at the expense of the Other.

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

How does the deconstruction of the sign, the emphasis on indeterminism in cultural and political judgment, transform our sense of the subject of culture and the historical agent of change? If we contest the grand, continuist narratives, then what alternative temporalities do we create to articulate the contrapuntal (Said) or interruptive (Spivak) formations of race, gender, class, and nation within a transnational world culture? Such problematic questions are activated within the terms and traditions of postcolonial critique as it reinscribes the cultural relations between spheres of social antagonism. Current debates in postmodernism question the cunning of modernity-its historical ironies, its disjunctive temporalities, the paradoxical nature of progress. It would profoundly affect the values and judgments of such interrogations if they were open to the argument that metropolitan histories of civitas cannot be conceived without evoking the colonial antecedents of the ideals of civility. The postcolonial translation of modernity does not simply revalue the contents of a cultural tradition or transpose values across cultures through the transcendent spirit of a "common humanity." Cultural translation transforms the value of culture-as-sign: as the time-signature of the historical "present" that is struggling to find its mode of nar-ration. The sign of cultural difference does not celebrate the great continuities of a past tradition, the seamless narratives of progress, the vanity of humanist wishes. Culture-as-sign articulates that in-between moment when the rule of language as semiotic system-linguistic difference, the arbitrariness of the sign-turns into a struggle for the historical and ethical right to signify. The rule of language as signifying system-the possibility of speaking at all-becomes the misrule of discourse: the right for only some to speak diachronically and differentially and for "others"-women, migrants, Third World peoples, Jews, Palestinians, for instance-to speak only symptomatically or marginally. How do we transform the formal value of linguistic difference into an analytic of cultural difference? How do we turn the "arbitrariness" of the sign into the critical practices of social authority? In what sense is this an interruption within the discourses of modernity? This is not simply a demand for a postcolonial semiology. From the postcolonial perspective, it is an intervention in the way discourses of modernity structure their objects of knowledge. The right to signify-to make a name for oneself-emerges from the moment of undecidability-a claim made by Jacques Derrida in "Des Tours de Babel," his essay on "figurative translation." Let us not forget that he sees translation as the trope for the process of dis-placement through which language names its object. But even more suggestive, for our postcolonial purposes, is the Babel metaphor that Derrida uses to describe the cultural, communal process of "making a name for oneself": "The Semites want to bring the world to reason and this reason can signify simultaneously a colonial violence . . . and a peaceful transparency of the human condition." This is emphatically not, as Terry Eagleton has recently described it, "the trace or aporia or ineffable flicker of difference which eludes all formalization, that giddy moment of failure, slippage, or jouissance."5 The undecidability of discourse is not to be read as the "excess" of the signifier, as an aestheticization of the formal arbitrariness of the sign. Rather, it represents, as Habermas suggests, the central ambivalence of the knowledge structure of modernity; "unconditionality" is the Janus-faced process at work in the modern moment of cultural judgment, where validity claims seek justification for their propositions in terms of the specificity of the "everyday." Undecidability or unconditionality "is built into the factual processes of mutual understanding.... Validity claimed for propositions and norms transcends spaces and times, but the claim must always be raised here and now, in specific contexts."6 Pace Eagleton, this is no giddy moment of failure; it is instead precisely the act of representation as a mode of regulating the limits or liminality of cultural knowledges. Habermas illuminates the undecidable or "unconditional" as the epistemological basis of cultural specificity, and thus, in the discourse of modernity, the claim to knowledge shifts from the "universal" to the domain of context-bound everyday practice. However, Habermas's notion of communicative reason presumes intersubjective understanding and reciprocal recognition. This renders his sense of cultural particularity essentially consensual and essentialist. What of those colonial cultures caught in the drama of the dialectic of the master and the enslaved or indentured?

Bhabha 92 (Homi, Professor of English and American Literature and Language, and the Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard University, Summer 1992, Freedom’s Basis in the Indeterminate, October, Vol. 61, The Identity in Question, pp. 46-57)

How does the deconstruction of the sign, the emphasis on indeterminism in cultural and political judgment, transform our sense of the subject of culture and the historical agent of change? what alternative temporalities do we create to articulate the contrapuntal (Said) or interruptive (Spivak) formations of race, gender, class, and nation within a transnational world culture? . The postcolonial translation of modernity does not simply revalue the contents of a cultural tradition or transpose values across cultures through the transcendent spirit of a "common humanity." Cultural translation transforms the value of culture-as-sign: as the time-signature of the historical "present" that is struggling to find its mode of nar-ration. Culture-as-sign articulates that in-between moment when the rule of language as semiotic system-linguistic difference, the arbitrariness of the sign-turns into a struggle for the historical and ethical right to signify. This is not simply a demand for a postcolonial semiology. From the postcolonial perspective, it is an intervention in the way discourses of modernity structure their objects of knowledge. The right to signify-to make a name for oneself-emerges from the moment of undecidability The undecidability of discourse is not to be read as the "excess" of the signifier, as an aestheticization of the formal arbitrariness of the sign. Rather, it represents, the central ambivalence of the knowledge structure of modernity; Undecidability or unconditionality "is built into the factual processes of mutual understanding.... and transcends spaces and times, but the claim must always be raised here and now it is a mode of regulating the limits or liminality of cultural knowledges Habermas illuminates the undecidable or "unconditional" as the epistemological basis of cultural specificity, and thus, in the discourse of modernity, the claim to knowledge shifts from the "universal" to the domain of context-bound everyday practice

Postcolonial translation of modern discourse shapes our understanding of the world

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

Fanon also states that the dreams of the colonized constantly turn towards the desire to take the place of the colonizer. This desire of ‘becoming-Other’ is mirrored in the colonizer, who wants to become the colonized, making the colonized into the threat to the ‘natural order’ (Krautwurst 2003). This mutual desire of becoming is also a mutual desire of destruction. The colonizer, says Fanon, would like nothing better than to annihilate the colonized: le colon demande à chaque représentant de la minorité qui opprime de descendre 30 ou 100 ou 200 indigènes [et] il d’un seul s’aperçoit que personne n’est indigné et qu’à l’ex trême tout le problème est de savoir si on peut faire ça coup ou par étapes. (Fanon 2002: 81-82) However, this annihilation would result in suicide. The colonizer requires the colonized at two levels of existence: economic and psychological. The labour power of the colonized is required in order for the colony to be viable. Also, elimination of the colonized would be elimination of the opposite end of the colonizer’s identifying binary. Similarly, the logic of the colonized is couched in the capacity of swallowing the colonizer through the sheer force of numbers. This desire for mutual destruction marks the beginning of anti-colonial violence and decolonization—not just of land, but also of mind and body. Anti-colonial violence, for Fanon, is a kind of “self-rehabilitation of the oppressed [which] begins in directly confronting the source of his dehumanization” (Bulhan 1985: 147). This rehabilitation is expressed through the act of violence. This violence demonstrates to the colonized that the colonial structures are not impervious to harm, and that her inferiority, entrenched through colonial ideology, is not essential. What becomes essential is that both colonized and colonizer are mortal, and that both shed blood. Thus through (violent) action against the symbols of colonialism, the colonized becomes more than a mere thing or animal. Therefore, at some level, Fanon is concerned with the transformation of the colonized individual into ‘man,’ which corresponds to a certain humanism in his thought: “la ‘chose’ colonisé devient homme dans le processus même par lequel elle se libère” (Fanon 2002:40). However, as his thought develops over the course of Les damnés de la terre, it becomes clear that this ‘becoming man’ by no means corresponds to a simple desire for recognition by the colonizer, or to fit within the category of ‘man’ as determined by universal humanism. The necessary violence to which the colonized resorts is a process of becoming. Through this process, the colonized becomes an agent, experiences that which is required to realize oneself in the world. This agent making, anti-colonial violence works against the existing structures of violence, both colonial and humanist. Through this violence there transpires a mutual transformation of both sides of the previously Manichean binary. As will be discussed in the final section, the transformative, anti-colonial violence is accompanied by the blossoming of a ‘national consciousness’ which is neither exclusionary nor a refounding of the violent structures of the state. As Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks states, anti-colonial violence as presented by Fanon is “utterly beyond good and evil [and] does not avail of a self-justifying meta-narrative” (2002: 85). This recognition of the pure nature of anti-colonial violence is the opening necessary for a discussion linking it to Derrida’s concept of divine violence. The spontaneous outbursts of violence that are the initial expressions of anticolonial violence have no ends in mind; this is violence as pure means, as pure expression, as pure anger, it has “no other aim than to show and show itself” (Derrida 2002: 287). Anti-colonial violence destroys the colonial law, the expression of universal humanism, through demonstrating its untenable inconsistencies. The boundaries of the colonial state are destroyed; violence begins to be perpetrated in the métropole itself (viz. the café bombings in France during the Algerian war of independence). The boundaries between colonizer and colonized are likewise destroyed. As mentioned, each becomes no less mortal than the other. In language strangely similar to that used by Derrida, Fanon states that once anti-colonial violence begins, the “enterprise of mystification” practiced by the “demagogues, opportunists, magicians” becomes “practically impossible” (Fanon 2002: 91; translation mine). The violence against the colonial structure pits divine violence against mythic violence; as the thousands of colonized are felled by machine gun fire, the founding/ preserving mythic violence of the colonial state works against itself. Its arbitrary nature becomes clear through its constant shedding of representative blood. Each victim of colonial violence represents all colonized individuals, in the consciousness of the colonizer and colonized. For the colonizer this is because the shapeless masses of the colonized are indistinguishable one from the other; for the colonized, colonial massacres work as the threat principle of the state. In this orgy of violence, which is at once both founding and preserving, the colonial state drives itself towards suicide. The foundational becomes all the more present in each preservation of order, and necessarily demystifies the foundation of the colonial state from the sheer quotidian presence of mythic fate. Each victim of anticolonial violence, however, is killed without warning, without threat. Anti-colonial violence does not threaten, and is never arbitrary. This violence is expiatory: through his death, the colonizer receives the capacity for atonement for his complicity in the violence of the colonial structure. The only possible characteristic of divine violence outlined by Derrida which presents a problem is bloodshed; for Derrida, “[b]lood would make all the difference” (2002: 288). Anti-colonial violence does not seem capable of escaping from the shedding of blood. However, it is clear that, as with divine violence, anti-colonial “violence is exercised on all life but to the profit of for the sake of the living” (ibid). The lack of a “self-justifying meta-narrative” (Seshadri-Crooks 2002: 85) in anticolonial violence, far more than bloodshed, seems to really ‘make all the difference.’ This is not to say that Fanon does not recognize that attempts are constantly made to ideologically channel anti-colonial violence. This channeling comes for the most part from the national (colonized) bourgeoisie and nationalist political parties, who attempt to pacify the colonized, and seize the role of ‘interlocutor’ between those working against the colonial structures, and those representing those structures. These actors work to re-orient the violence of the colonized towards a non-radical, passive acceptance of the terms of decolonization as determined by the colonizing power itself. Fanon characterizes the national bourgeoisie and mainstream political actors as “une sorte de classe d’esclaves libérés individuellement, d’esclaves affranchis” (Fanon 2002: 60-61). This ideological recuperation of spontaneous, divine, anti-colonial violence results not in the potential for a complete annihilation of the violence of colonial/ state structures, but a recreation of them. Just as Derrida states that “all revolutionary situations, all revolutionary discourses […] justify the recourse to violence by alleging the founding, in progress or to come, of a new law, of a new state” (2002: 269), Fanon recognizes that: [l]e militant qui fait face, avec des moyens rudimentaires, à la machine de guerre colonialiste se rend compte que dans le même temps où il démolit l’oppression coloniale il contribue par la bande à construire un autre appareil d’exploitation (2002: 138-9) For Fanon, prevention of the founding of a new ‘apparatus of exploitation’ is only possible through the inculcation of a national consciousness. This national consciousness denies the accumulation of power, and the rational recuperation, of the foundational violence of the state through a horizontal spread of capacity, responsibility and agency. This links with the mutual recognition achieved through the transformative process of anti-colonial violence, and with Derrida’s requirement of a recognition of the unique in any possible non-violent politics.

Krebs 07 (Andreas Krebs, Phd University of Ottawa,“The Transcendent and the Postcolonial Violence in Derrida and Fanon”,pg. 93, BW)

the dreams of the colonized constantly turn towards the desire to take the place of the colonizer. This desire of ‘becoming-Other’ is mirrored in the colonizer a mutual desire of destruction The colonizer would like nothing better than to annihilate the colonized However, this annihilation would result in suicide The labour power of the colonized is required in order for the colony to be viable. Similarly, the logic of the colonized is couched in the capacity of swallowing the colonizer through numbers. This marks the beginning of anti-colonial violence and decolonization not just of land, but also of mind and body. Anti-colonial violence is a self-rehabilitation of the oppressed in directly confronting the source of his dehumanization expressed through the act of violence violence demonstrates to the colonized that the colonial structures are not impervious to harm, and that her inferiority, entrenched through colonial ideology, is not essential. What becomes essential is that both colonized and colonizer are mortal, through action against the symbols of colonialism, the colonized becomes man this ‘becoming man’ by no means corresponds to a simple desire for recognition by the colonizer, or to fit within the category of ‘man’ as determined by universal humanism. The necessary violence to which the colonized resorts is a process of becoming. Through this process, the colonized becomes an agent, experiences that which is required to realize oneself in the world Through this violence there transpires a mutual transformation of both sides of the previously Manichean binary accompanied by the blossoming of a ‘national consciousness’ which is neither exclusionary nor a refounding of the violent structures of the state. anti-colonial violence as presented by Fanon is “utterly beyond good and evil does not avail of a self-justifying meta-narrative the initial expressions of anticolonial violence have no ends in mind this is violence as pure means, as pure expression, as pure anger, it has “no other aim than to show and show itself Anti-colonial violence destroys the colonial law, the expression of universal humanism, through demonstrating its untenable inconsistencies. The boundaries of the colonial state are destroyed ). The boundaries between colonizer and colonized are likewise destroyed. each becomes no less mortal than the other the “enterprise of mystification” practiced by the “demagogues, opportunists, magicians” becomes “practically impossible” The violence against the colonial structure pits divine violence against mythic violence; as the thousands of colonized are felled by machine gun fire, the founding mythic violence of the colonial state works against itself Its arbitrary nature becomes clear through its constant shedding of representative blood. Each victim of colonial violence represents all colonized individuals, in the consciousness of the colonizer and colonized. For the colonizer this is because the shapeless masses of the colonized are indistinguishable one from the other; for the colonized, colonial massacres work as the threat principle of the state. In this orgy of violence, which is at once both founding and preserving, the colonial state drives itself towards suicide. The foundational becomes all the more present in each preservation of order, and necessarily demystifies the foundation of the colonial state from the sheer quotidian presence of mythic fate. Each victim of anticolonial violence, however, is killed without warning, without threat. Anti-colonial violence does not threaten, and is never arbitrary. This violence is expiatory: through his death, the colonizer receives the capacity for atonement for his complicity in the violence of the colonial structure. anti-colonial “violence is exercised on all life but to the profit of for the sake of the livin national bourgeoisie and nationalist political parties, attempt to pacify the colonized These work to re-orient the violence of the colonized towards a non-radical, passive acceptance prevention of the founding of a new ‘apparatus of exploitation’ is only possible through the inculcation of a national consciousness. This denies the accumulation of power, of the foundational violence of the state through a horizontal spread of capacity, responsibility and agency. This links with the mutual recognition achieved through the transformative process of anti-colonial violence, and with Derrida’s requirement of a recognition of the unique in any possible non-violent politics.

In the colonial situation a desire of the Colony to destroy the colonized perpetuates a system of violence-only resisting the desire to become colonizer can the violence be overthrown through a symbolic upheaval.

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

War is the opposite of the anarchical relation of absolute responsibility for the Other that gives birth to human subjectivity. The obliteration of the transontological takes the tendency of producing a world in which war becomes the norm, rather than the exception. That is the basic meaning of the coloniality of being: the radical betrayal of the trans-ontological by the formation of a world in which the non-ethics of war become naturalized through the idea of race. The damne´ is the outcome of this process. Her agency needs to be defined by a consistent opposition to the paradigm of war and the promotion of a world oriented by the ideals of human generosity and receptivity. This is the precise meaning of decolonization: restoration of the logic of the gift. Fanon suggests as much in the conclusion of Black Skin, White Masks: Superiority? Inferiority? Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself? Was my freedom not given to me then in order to build the world of the You?65 Fanon’s message is clear: decolonization should aspire at the very minimum to restore or create a reality where racialized subjects could give and receive freely in societies founded on the principle of receptive generosity.66 Receptive generosity involves a break away from racial dynamics as well as from conceptions of gender and sexuality that inhibit generous interaction among subjects. In this sense, a consistent response to coloniality involves both decolonization and ‘des-gener-accio´n’ as projects, both of which are necessary for the YOU to emerge. Only in this way the trans-ontological can shine through the ontological, and love, ethics, and justice can take the role that the non-ethics of war have occupied in modern life.

Maldonado-Torres 07 (Nelson, PhD, Religious Studies with a Certificate for Outstanding Work in Africana Studies, Brown University, “On the Coloniality of Being,” Cultural Studies, volume: 21, pg. 243, MCJC)

The obliteration of the transontological takes the tendency of producing a world in which war becomes the norm, rather than the exception the basic meaning of the coloniality of being: the radical betrayal of the trans-ontological by the formation of a world in which the non-ethics of war become naturalized through the idea of race This is the precise meaning of decolonization: restoration of the logic of the gift. decolonization should aspire at the very minimum to restore or create a reality where racialized subjects could give and receive freely in societies founded on the principle of receptive generosity Receptive generosity involves a break away from racial dynamics as well as from conceptions of gender and sexuality that inhibit generous interaction among subjects Only in this way the trans-ontological can shine through the ontological, and love, ethics, and justice can take the role that the non-ethics of war have occupied in modern life.

Decolonization creates a free flow of subjectivity where race, sex, and gender dynamics can be dismantled from the war frame constituting the colonial situation.

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

Under the spell of neo-liberalism and the magic of the media promoting it, modernity and modernization, together with democracy, are being sold as a package trip to the promised land of happiness, a paradise where, for example, when you can no longer buy land because land itself is limited and not producible or monopolized by those who control the concentration of wealth, you can buy virtual land!!3 Yet, when people do not buy the package willingly or have other ideas of how economy and society should be organized, they become subject to all kinds of direct and indirect violence. It is not a spiritual claim, or merely a spiritual claim that I am making. The crooked rhetoric that naturalizes 'modernity' as a universal global process and point of arrival hides its darker side, the constant reproduction of 'coloniality'. In order to uncover the perverse logic — that Fanon pointed out — underlying the philosophical conundrum of modernity/coloniality and the political and economic structure of imperialism/colonialism, we must consider how to decolonize the 'mind' (Thiongo) and the 'imaginary' (Gruzinski) — that is, knowledge and being. Since the mid-seventies, the idea that knowledge is also colonized and, therefore, it needs to be de-colonized was expressed in several ways and in different disciplinary domains.4 However, the groundbreaking formulation came from the thought and the pen of Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano. Quijano's intellectual experience was shaped in his early years of involvement in the heated debates ignited by dependency theory, in the seventies. Dependency theory, however, maintained the debate in the political (e.g., state, military control and intervention) and economy, analyzing the relation¬ships of dependency, in those spheres, between center and periphery.5 That knowledge could be cast also in those terms was an idea to which Enrique Dussel, in 1977, hinted at in the first chapter of his Philosophy of Liberation titled 'Geo-politics and Philosophy'. In a complementary way, in the late eighties and early seventies, Anibal Quijano introduced the disturbing concept of 'coloniality' (the invisible and constitutive side of 'modernity'). In an article published in 1989 and reprinted in 1992, titled 'Colonialidad y modernidad- racionalidad' Quijano explicitly linked coloniality of power in the political and economic spheres with the coloniality of knowledge; and ended the argument with the natural consequence: if knowledge is colonized one of the task ahead is to de-colonize knowledge.6 In the past three or four years, the work and conversations among the members of the modernity/coloniality research project',7 de-coloniality became the common expression paired with the concept of coloniality and the extension of coloniality of power (economic and political) to coloniality of knowledge and of being (gender, sexuality, subjectivity and knowledge), were incorporated into the basic vocabulary among members of the research project.8 One of the central points of Quijano's critique to the complicity between modernity/rationality, is the exclusionary and totalitarian notion of Totality (I am aware of the pleonasm); that is a Totality that negates, exclude, occlude the difference and the possibilities of other totalities. Modern rationality is an engulfing and at the same time defensive and exclusionary. It is not the case, Quijano added, that in non-European imperial languages and epistemologies (Mandarin, Arabic, Bengali, Russian, Aymara, etc.), the notion of Totality doesn't exist or is unthinkable. But it is the case that, particularly since the 1500s and the growing dominance of Western epistemology (from Theo-logy to secular Ego- logy (e.g., Descartes, 'I think, therefore I am'), non-Western concepts of Totality had to be confronted with a growing imperial concept of Totality. The cases of the Ottoman and Inca Empires are often quoted as examples of respect for the difference. I am not of course offering the examples of the Ottoman and the Inca Empires as idea for the future but just in order to show the regionalism of the Western notion of Totality. I am observing that from 1500 on, Ottomans, Incas, Russians, Chinese, etc., moved toward and inverted 'recognition': they had to 'recognize' that Western languages and categories of thoughts, and therefore, political philosophy and political economy, were marching an expanding without 'recognizing' them as equal players in the game. Quijano’s project articulated around the notion of ‘coloniality of power’ moves in two simultaneous directions. One is the analytic. 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. Quijano acknowledges that postmodern thinkers already criticized the modern concept of Totality; but this critique is limited and internal to European history and the history of European ideas. That is why it is of the essence the critique of Totality from the perspective of coloniality and not only from the critique of post-modernity. Now, and this is important, the critique DELINKING 4 5 1 of the modern notion of Totality doesn’t lead necessarily to post-coloniality, but to de-coloniality. Thus, the second direction we can call the programmatic that is manifested in Quijano as a project of ‘desprendimiento’, of de-linking. At this junction, the analytic of coloniality and the programmatic of decoloniality moves away and beyond the post-colonial.

Mignolo 07 (Walter, professor@ Duke U on semiotics and literary theory, “DELINKING The rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality and the grammar of de-coloniality,” Cultural Studies, volume:21, pg.450-2, MCJC)

Under the spell of neo-liberalism modernity and modernization, together with democracy, are being sold as a package trip to the promised land of happiness, Yet, when people have other ideas of how economy and society should be organized, they become subject to all kinds of direct and indirect violence The crooked rhetoric that naturalizes 'modernity' as a universal global process and point of arrival hides its darker side, the constant reproduction of 'coloniality' In order to uncover the perverse logic underlying the philosophical conundrum of modernity/coloniality and the political and economic structure of imperialism/colonialism, we must consider how to decolonize knowledge and being the idea that knowledge is also colonized and, therefore, it needs to be de-colonized was expressed in several ways and in different disciplinary domains Quijano explicitly linked coloniality of power in the political and economic spheres with the coloniality of knowledge; and ended the argument with the natural consequence: if knowledge is colonized one of the task ahead is to de-colonize knowledge de-coloniality became the common expression paired with the concept of coloniality and the extension of coloniality of power (economic and political) to coloniality of knowledge and of being (gender, sexuality, subjectivity and knowledge), were incorporated into the basic vocabulary among members of the research project But it is the case that, particularly since the 1500s and the growing dominance of Western epistemology non-Western concepts of Totality had to be confronted with a growing imperial concept of Totality. The cases of the Ottoman and Inca Empires are often quoted as examples of respect for the difference. The concept of coloniality has opened up, the re-construction and the restitution of silenced histories, repressed subjectivities, subalternized knowledges and languages

Decolonizing knowledge and being is essential in bringing down coloniality.

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

The last statement may sound somewhat messianic but it is, nonetheless, an orientation that in the first decade of the twenty-first century has shown its potential and its viability. Such ‘destruction’ shall not be imagined as a global revolution lead by one concept of Totality that would be different from the modern one, but equally totalitarian. The Soviet Union was already an experiment whose results is not an exemplar to follow. The statement shall be read in parallel to Quijano’s observations about none-totalitarian concepts of totality; to his own concept of heterogeneous structural-histories (I will come back below to this concept), and to what (I will develop below) pluriversality as 4 5 2 CULTURAL STUDIES a universal project . And, above all, it shall be read in complementarity with Quijano’s idea of ‘desprenderse’ (delinking).10 In this regard, Quijano proposes a de-colonial epistemic shift when he clarifies that: En primer te´rmino, la descolonizacio´n epistemolo´gica, para dar paso luego a una nueva comunicacio´n inter-cultural, a un intercambio de experiencias y de significaciones, como la base de otra racionalidad que pueda pretender, con legitimidad, a alguna universalidad. Pues nada menos racional, finalmente, que la pretension de que la especı´fica cosmovisio´n de una etnia particular sea impuesta como la racionalidad universal, aunque tal etnia se llama Europa occidental. Porque eso, en verdad, es pretender para un provincianismo el tı´tulo de universalidad (italics mine).11 The argument that follows is, in a nutshell, contained in this paragraph. First, epistemic de-colonization runs parallel to Amin’s delinking. A delinking that leads to de-colonial epistemic shift and brings to the foreground other epistemologies, other principles of knowledge and understanding and, consequently, other economy, other politics, other ethics. ‘New inter-cultural communication’ should be interpreted as new inter-epistemic communication (as we will see bellow, is the case of the concept of inter-culturality among Indigenous intellectuals in Ecuador). Furthermore, de-linking presupposes to move toward a geo- and body politics of knowledge that on the one hand denounces the pretended universality of a particular ethnicity (body politics), located in a specific part of the planet (geo-politics), that is, Europe where capitalism accumulated as a consequence of colonialism. De-linking then shall be understood as a de-colonial epistemic shift leading to other-universality, that is, to pluri-versality as a universal project. I’ll come back to this point in section IV (‘The grammar of de-coloniality’).

Mignolo 07 (Walter, professor@ Duke U on semiotics and literary theory, “DELINKING The rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality and the grammar of de-coloniality,” Cultural Studies, volume:21, pg.452-3, MCJC)

Such ‘destruction’ shall not be imagined as a global revolution lead by one concept of Totality that would be different from the modern one, but equally totalitarian Quijano proposes a de-colonial epistemic shift epistemic de-colonization runs parallel to delinking. A delinking that leads to de-colonial epistemic shift and brings to the foreground other epistemologies, other principles of knowledge and understanding and, consequently, other economy, other politics, other ethics. de-linking presupposes to move toward a geo- and body politics of knowledge that on the one hand denounces the pretended universality of a particular ethnicity

Epistemic de-colonization collapses and delinks the political with coloniality

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

From such a colonial encounter between the white presence and its black semblance, there emerges the question of the ambivalence of mimicry as a problematic of colonial subjection. For if Sade's scandalous theatricalization of language repeatedly reminds us that discourse can claim "no priority," then the work of Edward Said will not let us forget that the "ethnocentric and erratic will to power from which texts can spring"19 is itself a theater of war. Mimicry, as the metonymy of presence is, indeed, such an erratic, eccentric strategy of authority in colonial discourse. Mimicry does not merely destroy narcissistic authority through the repetitious slippage of difference and desire. It is the process of thefixation of the colonial as a form of cross-classificatory, discriminatory knowledge in the defiles of an interdictory discourse, and therefore necessarily raises the question of the authorizationo f colonial representations. A question of authority that goes beyond the subject's lack of priority (castration) to a historical crisis in the conceptuality of colonial man as an object of regulatory power, as the subject of racial, cultural, national representation."This culture . . . fixed in its colonial status," Fanon suggests, "(is) both present and mummified, it testified against its members. It defines them in fact without appeal."20 The ambivalence of mimicry--almost but not quite-suggests that the fetishized colonial culture is potentially and strategically an insurgent counter-appeal. What I have called its "identity-effects," are always crucially split. Under cover of camouflage, mimicry, like the fetish, is a part-object that radically revalues the normative knowledges of the priority of race, writing, history. For the fetish mimes the forms of authority at the point at which it deauthorizes them. Similarly, mimicry rearticulates presence in terms of its "otherness," that which it disavows. There is a crucial difference between this colonial articulation of man and his doubles and that which Foucault describes as "thinking the unthought"21 which, for nineteenth-century Europe, is the ending of man's alienation by reconciling him with his essence. The colonial discourse that articulates an interdictory" otherness" is precisely the "other scene" of this nineteenth-century European desire for an authentic historical consciousness. The "unthought" across which colonial man is articulated is that process of classificatory confusion that I have described as the metonymy of the substitutive chain of ethical and cultural discourse. This results in the splitting of colonial discourse so that two attitudes towards external reality persist; one takes reality into consideration while the other disavows it and replaces it by a product of desire that repeats, rearticulates "reality" as mimicry. So Edward Long can say with authority, quoting variously, Hume, Eastwick, and Bishop Warburton in his support, that: Ludicrous as the opinion may seem I do not think that an orangutang husband would be any dishonour to a Hottentot female.22 Such contradictory articulations of reality and desire--seen in racist stereotypes, statements, jokes, myths- are not caught in the doubtful circle of the return of the repressed. They are the effects of a disavowal that denies the differences of the other but produces in its stead forms of authority and multiple belief that alienate the assumptions of "civil" discourse. If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudoscientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to "normalize" formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality. The ambivalence of colonial authority repeatedly turns from mimicry-a difference that is almost nothing but not quite-to menace- a difference that is almost total but not quite. And in that other scene of colonial power, where history turns to farce and presence to "a part," can be seen the twin figures of narcissism and paranoia that repeat furiously, uncontrollably. In the ambivalent world of the "not quite/not white," on the margins of metropolitan desire, the founding objects of the Western world become the erratic, eccentric, accidental objets trouves of the colonial discourse- the part-objects of presence. It is then that the body and the book loose their representational authority. Black skin splits under the racist gaze, displaced into signs of bestiality, genitalia, grotesquerie, which reveal the phobic myth of the undifferentiated whole white body. And the holiest of books - the Bible - bearing both the standard of the cross and the standard of empire finds itself strangely dismembered. In May 1817 a missionary wrote from Bengal:

Bhaba 1984 (Homi K, Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard, 1984, "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse” http://www.jstor.org/stable/778467)(pg. 131-133)

there emerges the question of the ambivalence of mimicry as a problematic of colonial subjection. Edward Said will not let us forget that the "ethnocentric and erratic will to power from which texts can spring"19 is itself a theater of war. Mimicry, as the metonymy of presence is, indeed, such an erratic, eccentric strategy of authority in colonial discourse. Mimicry does not merely destroy narcissistic authority through the repetitious slippage of difference and desire. It is the process of thefixation of the colonial as a form of cross-classificatory, discriminatory knowledge in the defiles of an interdictory discourse, and therefore necessarily raises the question of the authorizationo f colonial representations. A question of authority that goes beyond the subject's lack of priority (castration) to a historical crisis in the conceptuality of colonial man as an object of regulatory power, as the subject of racial, cultural, national representation. This culture . . . fixed in its colonial status There is a crucial difference between this colonial articulation of man and his doubles and that which Foucault describes as "thinking the unthought"21 which, for nineteenth-century Europe, is the ending of man's alienation by reconciling him with his essence. The colonial discourse that articulates an interdictory" otherness" is precisely the "other scene" of this nineteenth-century European desire for an authentic historical consciousness. The "unthought" across which colonial man is articulated is that process of classificatory confusion that I have described as the metonymy of the substitutive chain of ethical and cultural discourse. This results in the splitting of colonial discourse so that two attitudes towards external reality persist; one takes reality into consideration while the other disavows it and replaces it by a product of desire that repeats, rearticulates "reality" as mimicry. Such contradictory articulations of reality and desire--seen in racist stereotypes, statements, jokes, myths- are not caught in the doubtful circle of the return of the repressed. They are the effects of a disavowal that denies the differences of the other but produces in its stead forms of authority and multiple belief that alienate the assumptions of "civil" discourse. colonial power can be seen the twin figures of narcissism and paranoia that repeat furiously, uncontrollably. In the ambivalent world of the "not quite/not white," the founding objects of the Western world become the erratic, eccentric, accidental objets trouves of the colonial discourse . Black skin splits under the racist gaze, displaced into signs of bestiality, genitalia, grotesquerie, which reveal the phobic myth of the undifferentiated whole white body.

Mimcry breaks out of the traditional notion of colonization.

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

The discourse of post-Enlightenment English colonialism often speaks in a tongue that is forked, not false. If colonialism takes power in the name of history, it repeatedly exercises its authority through the figures of farce. For the epic intention of the civilizing mission, "human and not wholly human" in the famous words of Lord Rosebery, "writ by the finger of the Divine" 1 often produces a text rich in the traditions of trompe l'oeil, irony, mimicry, and repetition. In this comic turn from the high ideals of the colonial imagination to its low mimetic literary effects, mimicry emerges as one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge. Within that conflictual economy of colonial discourse which Edward Said2 describes as the tension between the synchronic panoptical vision of domination- the demand for identity, stasis-and the counter-pressure of the diachrony of history-change, difference - mimicry represents an ironic compromise. If I may adapt Samuel Weber's formulation of the marginalizing vision of castration,3 then colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a differencteh at is almost thes ame, but not quite. Which is to say, that the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference. The authority of that mode of colonial discourse that I have called mimicry is therefore stricken by an indeterminacy: mimicry emerges as the representation of a difference that is itself a process of disavowal. Mimicry is, thus, the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation, and discipline, which "appropriates" the Other as it visualizes power. Mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate, however, a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to both "normalized" knowledges and disciplinary powers. The effect of mimicry on the authority of colonial discourse is profound and disturbing. For in "normalizing" the colonial state or subject, the dream of post-Enlightenment civility alienates its own language of liberty and produces another knowledge of its norms. The ambivalence which thus informs this strategy is discernible, for example, in Locke's Second Treatise which splits to reveal the limitations of liberty in his double use of the word "slave": first simply, descriptively as the locus of a legitimate form of ownership, then as the trope for an intolerable, illegitimate exercise of power. What is articulated in that distance between the two uses is the absolute, imagined difference between the "Colonial" State of Carolina and the Original State of Nature. It is from this area between mimicry and mockery, where the reforming, civilizing mission is threatened by the displacing gaze of its disciplinary double, that my instances of colonial imitation come. What they all share is a discursive process by which the excess or slippage produced by the ambivalenceo f mimicry (almost the same, but not quite) does not merely "rupture" the discourse, but becomes transformed into an uncertainty which fixes the colonial subject as a "partial" presence. By "partial" I mean both "incomplete" and "virtual." It is as if the very emergence of the "colonial" is dependent for its representation upon some strategic limitation or prohibition within the authoritative discourse itself. The success of colonial appropriation depends on a proliferation of inappropriate objects that ensure its strategic failure, so that mimicry is at once resemblance and menace.

Bhaba 1984 (Homi K, Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard, 1984, "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse” http://www.jstor.org/stable/778467)(pg. 127)

discourse of post-Enlightenment English colonialism often speaks in a tongue that is forked, not false. If colonialism takes power in the name of history, it repeatedly exercises its authority through the figures of farce. For the epic intention of the civilizing mission, "human and not wholly human" mimicry emerges as one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge. the demand for identity, stasis-and the counter-pressure of the diachrony of history-change, difference - mimicry represents an ironic compromise. colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a differencteh at is almost thes ame, but not quite. Which is to say, that the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference. The authority of that mode of colonial discourse that I have called mimicry is therefore stricken by an indeterminacy: mimicry emerges as the representation of a difference that is itself a process of disavowal. Mimicry is, thus, the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation, and discipline, which "appropriates" the Other as it visualizes power. Mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate, however, a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to both "normalized" knowledges and disciplinary powers. The effect of mimicry on the authority of colonial discourse is profound and disturbing. For in "normalizing" the colonial state or subject, the dream of post-Enlightenment civility alienates its own language of liberty and produces another knowledge of its norms. It is from this area between mimicry and mockery, where the reforming, civilizing mission is threatened by the displacing gaze of its disciplinary double, It is as if the very emergence of the "colonial" is dependent for its representation upon some strategic limitation or prohibition within the authoritative discourse itself. The success of colonial appropriation depends on a proliferation of inappropriate objects that ensure its strategic failure, so that mimicry is at once resemblance and menace.

Mimicry may be used as a tool to oppress the postcolonial subject, or a method to explode the postcolonial power matrix.

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

The idea of totality in general is today questioned and denied in Europe, not only by the perennial empiricists, but also by an entire intellectual community that calls itself postmodernist. In fact, in Europe, the idea of totality is a product of colonial/modernity. And it is demonstrable, as we have seen above, that the European ideas of totality led to theoretical reductionism and to the metaphysics of a macro-historical subject. Moreover, such ideas have been associated with undesirable political practices, behind a dream of the total rationalization of society. It is not necessary, however, to reject the whole idea of totality in order to divest oneself of the ideas and images with which it was elaborated within European colonial/modernity. What is to be done is something very different: to liberate the production of knowledge, reflection, and communication from the pitfalls of European rationality/modernity. Outside the 'West', virtually in all known cultures, every cosmic vision, every image, all systematic production of knowledge is associated with a perspective of totality. But in those cultures, the perspective of totality in knowledge includes the acknowledgement of the heterogeneity of all reality; of the irreducible, contradictory character of the latter; of the legitimacy, i.e., the desirability, of the diverse character of the components of all reality — and therefore, of the social. The idea of social totality, then, not only does not deny, but depends on the historical diversity and heterogeneity of society, of every society. In other words, it not only does not deny, but it requires the idea of an 'other' — diverse, different. That difference does not necessarily imply the unequal nature of the 'other' and therefore the absolute externality of relations, nor the hierarchical inequality nor the social inferiority of the other. The differences are not necessarily the basis of domination. At the same time — and because of that — historical-cultural heterogeneity implies the co- presence and the articulation of diverse historical 'logic' around one of them, which is hegemonic but in no way unique. In this way, the road is closed to all reductionism, as well as to the metaphysics of an historical macro- subject capable of its own rationality and of historical teleology, of which individuals and specific groups, classes for instance, would hardly be carriers or missionaries. The critique of the European paradigm of rationality/modernity is indispensable — even more, urgent. But it is doubtful if the criticism consists of a simple negation of all its categories; of the dissolution of reality in discourse; of the pure negation of the idea and the perspective of totality in cognition. 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. It is the instrumentalisation of the reasons for power, of colonial power in the first place, which produced distorted paradigms of knowledge and spoiled the liberating promises of modernity. The alternative, then, is clear: the destruction of the coloniality of world power. First of all, epistemo- logical decolonization, as decoloniality, is needed to clear the way for new intercultural communication, for an interchange of experiences and meanings, as the basis of another rationality which may legitimately pretend to some universality. Nothing is less rational, finally, than the pretension that the specific cosmic vision of a particular ethnie should be taken as universal rationality, even if such an ethnie is called Western Europe because this is actually pretend to impose a provincialism as universalism. The liberation of intercultural relations from the prison of coloniality also implies the freedom of all peoples to choose, individually or collectively, such relations: a freedom to choose between various cultural orientations, and, above all, the freedom to produce, criticize, change, and exchange culture and society. This liberation is, part of the process of social liberation from all power organized as inequality, discrimination, exploitation, and as domina¬tion.

Quijano 2007 (Aníbal, PhD National University of San Marcos Peru, “COLONIALITY AND MODERNITY/RATIONALITY,” Cultural Studies, volume: 21, 1, pg. 177, JC)

It is not necessary, however, to reject the whole idea of totality in order to divest oneself of the ideas and images with which it was elaborated within European colonial/modernity. What is to be done is something very different: to liberate the production of knowledge, reflection, and communication from the pitfalls of European rationality/modernity. the perspective of totality in knowledge includes the acknowledgement of the heterogeneity of all reality; the desirability, of the diverse character of the components of all reality — and therefore, of the social. At the same time — and because of that — historical-cultural heterogeneity implies the co- presence and the articulation of diverse historical 'logic' around one of them, which is hegemonic but in no way unique. The critique of the European paradigm of rationality/modernity is indispensable — even more, urgent. But it is doubtful if the criticism consists of a simple negation of all its categories; of the dissolution of reality in discourse; of the pure negation of the idea and the perspective of totality in cognition The alternative, then, is clear: the destruction of the coloniality of world power. epistemo- logical decolonization, as decoloniality, is needed to clear the way for new intercultural communication, , as the basis of another rationality which may legitimately pretend to some universality The liberation of intercultural relations from the prison of coloniality also implies the freedom of all peoples to choose, individually or collectively, such relations: a freedom to choose between various cultural orientations, and, above all, the freedom to produce, criticize, change, and exchange culture and society

The alternative is to reject the aff – epistemological decolonization is necessary to clear the way for intercultural communication. Only then, can we liberate those who are imprisoned by coloniality.

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

Yet in cultural terms the nation is perhaps an even more ambiguous phenomenon than it has been in the past, and this is particularly so in post-colonial theory. The nation-state has been critiqued in post-colonial analysis largely because the post-independence, postcolonized nation, that wonderful utopian idea, proved to be a focus of exclusion and division rather than unity; perpetuating the class divisions of the colonial state rather than liberating national subjects. However nationalism, and its vision of a liberated nation has still been extremely important to post-colonial studies because the idea of nation has so clearly focussed the utopian ideals of anti-colonialism. There is perhaps no greater example of this than India, where independence was preceded by decades of utopian nationalist thought, yet in Rabindranath Tagore we find also the earliest and most widely known anti-nationalist. For Tagore, there can be no good nationalism; it can only be what he calls the “fierce self-idolatry of nation-worship” (2002, 15)—the exquisite irony being that his songs were used as Bengali, Bangladeshi and Indian Copyright © Bill Ashcroft 2009. This text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged¶13 national anthems. So the trajectory of colonial utopianism has been deeply ambivalent: on the one hand offering the vision of a united national people, and on the other a perhaps even more utopian idea of the spiritual unity of all peoples. The years since 1947, when India led the way for other colonial states into post-colonial independence, has been marked by the simultaneous deferral of pre-independence nationalist utopias, and yet a vibrant and unquenchable utopianism in the various postcolonial literatures. This utopianism has taken many forms but its most significant postcolonial characteristic has been the operation of memory. Yet in the decades before and after the turn of the century utopianism has taken a significant turn—one affected by globalization, with its increasing mobility and diasporic movement of peoples—that might be cautiously given the term cosmopolitan. Again it is India that has led the way in its literature, not only because of the proliferation of South Asian diasporic writing, but also because India itself has thrown the traditional idea of the nation as imagined community into question. That national ideal of one people, so successfully championed by Nehru has never been more challenged than it has by India’s size and complexity. India shows us that the ‘nation’ is not synonymous with the state and despite the increasing mobility of peoples across borders, the proliferation of diasporas, the increasing rhetoric of international displacement, India reveals that before national borders have been crossed, the national subject is already the subject of a transnation. I want to propose the concept of transnation to extend the post-colonial critique of nation, (or more specifically the linking of nation and state) and to argue with the entrenched idea of diaspora as simply defined by absence and loss. Such a definition of the diasporic population as fundamentally absent from the nation fails to recognise the liberating possibilities of mobility. The transnation, on the other hand, represents the utopian idea that national borders may not in the end need to be the authoritarian constructors of identity that they have become. The beginning of the twenty first century reveals a utopianism as powerful as it is different from the nationalist utopianism that began to grow in the early decades of the twentieth. This cosmopolitan utopianism reaches beyond the state and considers the liberating potential of difference and movement. This is, of course, dangerous territory because we have ample evidence of the melancholic plight of people who must move across borders, must in fact flee the nation either as economic or political refugees, or as subjects oppressed in some way by state power. Such people are decidedly unfree. Transnation may be mistaken to rest on a far too benign view of global movement and may encounter the objection that the idea of freedom from borders is in fact ignoring the plight into which globalization has thrown people disadvantaged by class, ethnicity, war, tyranny and all of the many reasons why they may need to escape. For this reason I treat the term ‘cosmopolitan’ with considerable caution, as a word complicated by overtones of urbanity and sophistication, a term much more successful as an adjective than a noun. The term ‘transnation’, while it pivots on a critique of the nation, and a utopian projection beyond the tyranny of national identity, nevertheless acknowledges that people live in nations and when they move, move within and beyond nations, sometimes without privilege and without hope. The transnation is more than ‘the international,’ or ‘the transnational,’ which might more properly be conceived as a relation between states. The concept exposes the distinction between the occupants of the geographical entity—the historically produced multi-ethnic society whom we might call the ‘nation’ and the political, geographic and administrative structures of that nation that might be called the ‘state.’ Transnation is the fluid, migrating outside of the state (conceptually and culturally as well as geographically) that begins within the nation. This is possibly most obvious in India where the ‘nation’ is the perpetual scene of translation, but translation is but one example of the movement, the ‘betweenness’ by which the subjects of the transnation are constituted. It is the ‘inter’—the cutting edge of translation and renegotiation, the inbetween space—that carries the burden of the meaning of culture. Nevertheless, the ‘transnation’ does not refer to an object in political space. It is a way of talking about subjects in their ordinary lives, subjects who live in-between the positivities by which subjectivity is normally constituted. That the transnation is distinct from diaspora can be confirmed by seeing Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) as the founding text of a new generation. This generation was indeed characterised by mobility and hybridity and gained worldwide attention through Indian literature in English, literature from what might called the ‘third-wave’ diaspora. It was characterised by a deep distrust of the boundaries of the nation, a distrust embodied in Saleem’s despair. But Rushdie’s novel had a different, more utopian vision as he explains in Imaginary Homelands The story of Saleem does indeed lead him to despair. But the story is told in a manner designed to echo, as closely as my abilities allowed, the Indian talent for non-stop self-regeneration. This is why the narrative constantly throws up new stories, why it “teems.” The form – multitudinous, hinting at the infinite possibilities of the country – is the optimistic counterweight to Saleem's personal tragedy. (1991, 16) Saleem’s personal tragedy is of course the tragedy of the post-colonial nation. But it is also the tragedy of the idea of the bordered nation itself, the very concept of a bounded utopian space within which a diverse people could come together as one. The saving grace, for Rushdie, is the capacity of a people to ‘teem,’ its irrepressible and exorbitant capacity to transcend the nation that becomes its most hopeful gesture. This way of describing national concerns deeply rooted in culture and myth engages the nation as a ‘transnation,’ a complex of mobility and multiplicity that supersedes both ‘nation’ and ‘state.’ What is perhaps most striking about contemporary post-colonial utopianism is that it captures the spirit of liberation strengthened rather than suppressed by the massive absurdities of the ‘War on Terror.’ Marxist utopianism was generated paradoxically by the growth of neo-liberal capitalism, growing stronger and stronger during the latter half of the Twentieth Century as communist states imploded. But I think this growth can be matched by the deep vein of postcolonial utopianism that we find in literature, a vein of hope that becomes more prominent with the growth of transnational and diasporic writing. This is quite different from that nationalist utopianism that died under the weight of post-independence reality. This is a global utopianism now entering the realm of critical discourse, even in the most agonistic of critics. While the utopianism of post-colonial literature has developed extensively during the Twentieth Century, I want to address examples of this utopian tendency in post-colonial criticism at the turn of this century. Paul Gilroy’s After Empire (2004) and Edward Said’s Freud and the non-European (2003) indicate that the element of hope circulating around the possibility of freedom from nation, (or at least from the ontological constriction of national borders), and freedom from identity itself, may be gathering strength as a feature of twenty first century literature and criticism. Indeed, the characteristic these works all share is a utopianism deeply embedded in critique, a tentative hope for a different world emerging from a clear view of the melancholic state of this one.

Ashcroft 2009 (Bill, teaches at the University of Hong Kong and the University of NSW, editor of The Post-Colonial Studies Reader and the author of The Empire Writes Back, “Beyond the Nation: Post-Colonial Hope”, The Journal of the European Association of Studies on Australia, Australian Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona )

, that wonderful utopian idea, proved to be a focus of exclusion and division rather than unity; perpetuating the class divisions of the colonial state rather than liberating national subjects. The transnation, on the other hand, represents the utopian idea that national borders may not in the end need to be the authoritarian constructors of identity that they have become. The beginning of the twenty first century reveals a utopianism as powerful as it is different from the nationalist utopianism This cosmopolitan utopianism reaches beyond the state and considers the liberating potential of difference and movement people who must move across borders, must in fact flee the nation either as economic or political refugees, or as subjects oppressed in some way by state power. Such people are decidedly unfree The term ‘transnation’, while it pivots on a critique of the nation, and a utopian projection beyond the tyranny of national identity, nevertheless acknowledges that people live in nations and when they move, move within and beyond nations, sometimes without privilege and without hope. It is the ‘inter’—the cutting edge of translation and renegotiation, the inbetween space—that carries the burden of the meaning of culture it is the tragedy of the idea of the bordered nation itself, the very concept of a bounded utopian space within which a diverse people could come together as one But this growth can be matched by the deep vein of postcolonial utopianism a vein of hope quite different from that nationalist utopianism that died under the weight of post-independence reality. This is a global utopianism now entering the realm of critical discourse, even in the most agonistic of critics the possibility of freedom from nation, (or at least from the ontological constriction of national borders), and freedom from identity itself, may be gathering strength as a feature of twenty first century literature and criticism , a tentative hope for a different world emerging from a clear view of the melancholic state of this one.

Through the power of discourse we must break through the ontological constriction of national borders, only then will we be free

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

Globalization studies, political-economy paradigms and world-system analysis, with only a few exceptions, have not derived the epistemological and theoretical implications of the epistemic critique coming from subaltern locations in the colonial divide and expressed in academia through ethnic studies and woman studies. They still continue to produce knowledge from the Western man ‘point zero’ god-eye view. This has led to important problems in the way we conceptualize global capitalism and the ‘world-system’. These concepts are in need of decolonization and this can only be achieved with a decolonial epistemology that overtly assumes the decolonial geopolitics and body-politics of knowledge as points of departure to a radical critique. The following examples can illustrate this point. If we analyze the European colonial expansion from a Eurocentric point of view, what we get is a picture in which the origins of the so-called capitalist world-system is primarily produced by the inter-imperial competition among European Empires. The primary motive for this expansion was to find shorter routes to the East, which let accidentally to the so-called discovery and, eventual, Spanish colonization of the Americas. From this point of view, the capitalist world-system would be primarily an economic system that determine the behavior of the major social actors by the economic logic of making profits as manifested in the extraction of surplus value and the ceaseless accumulation of capital at a world-scale. Moreover, the concept of capitalism implied in this perspective privileges economic relations over other social relations. Accordingly, the transformation in the relations of production produces a new class structure typical of capitalism as oppose to other social systems and other forms of domination. Class analysis and economic structural transformations are privileged over other power relations.

Grosfoguel 07 (Ramon, “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn,” Cultural Studies, volume: 21, pg. 215, MCJC)

Globalization studies and world-system analysis have not derived the epistemological and theoretical implications of the epistemic critique coming from subaltern locations in the colonial divide They still continue to produce knowledge from the Western man ‘point zero’ god-eye view. This has led to important problems in the way we conceptualize global capitalism and the ‘world-system’. These concepts are in need of decolonization and this can only be achieved with a decolonial epistemology that assumes the decolonial geopolitics and body-politics of knowledge as points of departure to a radical critique If we analyze the European colonial expansion from a Eurocentric point of view, what we get is a picture in which the origins of the so-called capitalist world-system is primarily produced by the inter-imperial competition among European Empires From this point of view, the capitalist world-system would be primarily an economic system that determine the behavior of the major social actors by the economic logic of making profits as manifested in the extraction of surplus value and the ceaseless accumulation of capital at a world-scale. Class analysis and economic structural transformations are privileged over other power relations.

The criticism of capitalism is rooted in westernized, Eurocentric view of the world that colonized in the first place.

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Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

The assumption of a totalizing perspective and the focus on resistance and historic agency are two aspects that distinguish this work among contemporary Marxist theory. The simultaneous privileging of both a totalizing perspective and subaltern voices, however, creates tensions in attempting to unify theory and practice. For example, the totality perspective privileges systematic knowledge over experience in theorizing a socialist project of emancipation, whereas politics organized around subaltern identities typically grow out of the experience of oppression. One wonders to what extent these positions are consistent. Adopting a totalizing perspective implies assuming the right to speak for others. Traditionally, it has been intellectuals who have had the time and economic support to theorize a totality beyond their own material experience. The question arises as to whether one presuming to speak from a totalizing perspective can let the subaltern speak? If the subaltern speaks from experience and the intellectual from systematic knowledge, which do we privilege? The question need not be posed as such a rigid either/or proposition, but I raise it to point up an abiding tension in Racial Formations/Critical Transformations which surfaces most fully in chapter 5 titled "Beyond Identity Politics." San Juan dismisses identity politics on the basis of an experience he had attending a conference on "Issues of Identity" which featured writers and critics. Writers "found themselves privileged somehow as the fountainhead of answers to questions of Asian-America personal/collective identity" while critics, commenting in theoretical vocabulary, found themselves admonished "for not conforming to the unwittingly self-serving identity politics." San Juan's attempts to introduce distinctions between knowledge and experience failed, knowledge being taken as a code word for theory. This experience, in San Juan's view, measures the movement away from engagement with structures of power and toward a psychotherapeutic introspection which internalizes and depoliticizes real issues of political struggle characteristic of some tendencies in identity politics. Nonetheless San Juan, I think, too quickly scraps a viable political strategy, the idea of organizing around shared identity, which was crucial to the women's liberation movement in the 1960s and classic nationalist movements and also informs Fanon's and Cabral's writings. Indeed, San Juan's own emphasis on nationalist struggles and their use of race "as a principle of difference in constructing their collective identity through symbolic (cultural) modes" underwrites a politics of identity. This tension between totality and identity, knowledge and experience, might be inherent in any attempt to develop a totalizing vision necessary to any socialist project. In maintaining a commitment to the self-determination of oppressed peoples, we must negotiate this tension carefully and not look for easy resolutions. We must look to synthesize knowledge and experience in ways that allow the subaltern to speak, without granting automatic authority to that voice and silencing those whose perspective derives not from experience but from research and critical practice. On the whole, I sympathize with San Juan's defense of theory. His work should give all scholars a sense of the political centrality of their theoretical work while also agitating them to activist work. On the flip side, this work should give activists skeptical of theory, who might view university reform movements as divorced from the real battle, a sense of the importance of critically transforming our world through a dialectic of theory and practice.

Libretti 96 (Tim, Ph.D., Professor at the University of Michigan in American Modernism and Minority Literatures, January-February 1996, Beyond Liberal Multiculturalism, http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/2485)

The simultaneous privileging of both a totalizing perspective and subaltern voices creates tensions in attempting to unify theory and practice. the totality perspective privileges systematic knowledge over experience in theorizing a socialist project of emancipation, whereas politics organized around subaltern identities typically grow out of the experience of oppression Adopting a totalizing perspective implies assuming the right to speak for others The question arises as to whether one presuming to speak from a totalizing perspective can let the subaltern speak? If the subaltern speaks from experience and the intellectual from systematic knowledge, which do we privilege? The question need not be posed as such a rigid either/or proposition San Juan's attempts to introduce distinctions between knowledge and experience failed, knowledge being taken as a code word for theory. San Juan's own emphasis on nationalist struggles and their use of race "as a principle of difference in constructing their collective identity through symbolic (cultural) modes" underwrites a politics of identity In maintaining a commitment to the self-determination of oppressed peoples, we must negotiate this tension carefully and not look for easy resolutions. We must look to synthesize knowledge and experience in ways that allow the subaltern to speak, without granting automatic authority to that voice and silencing those whose perspective derives not from experience

The subaltern’s voice and the intellectual’s knowledge can coexist

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Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

Pedagogically, it is important for my argument to conceptualize “modernity/coloniality” as two sides of the same coin and not as two separate frames of mind: you cannot be modern without being colonial; and if you are on the colonial side of the spectrum you have to transact with modernity – you cannot ignore it. The very idea of America cannot be separated from coloniality: the entire continent emerged as such in the European consciousness as a massive extent of land to be appropriated and of people to be converted to Christianity, and whose labor could be exploited. Coloniality, as a term, is much less frequently heard than “modernity” and many people tend to confuse it with “colonialism.” The two words are related, of course. While “colonialism” refers to specific historical periods and places of imperial domination (e.g., Spanish, Dutch, British, the US since the beginning of the twentieth century), “coloniality” refers to the logical structure of colonial domination underlying the Spanish, Dutch, British, and US control of the Atlantic economy and politics, and from there the control and management of almost the entire planet. In each of the particular imperial periods of colonialism – whether led by Spain (mainly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) or by England (from the nineteenth century to World War II) or by the US (from the early twentieth century until now) – the same logic was maintained; only power changed hands. Some would say (mainly before the 9/11 attacks on the US) that the US was not an imperial country because it has no colonies like those of Spain or England. This opinion, however, confuses “colonialism” with having “colonies” in the sense of maintaining the physical presence of institutions, administrators, and armies in the colonized country or region. And it confuses also “colonialism” with “coloniality.” Coloniality is the logic of domination in the modern/ colonial world, beyond the fact that the imperial/colonial country was once Spain, then England and now the US. Modern technology, alongside political and economic restructuring in the second half of the twentieth century, has made it unnecessary to colonize in the old, more obvious, manner. Still, the US does in fact maintain military bases in strategic parts of the world (e.g., the Middle East and South America). Likewise, the occupation of Iraq and consequent pressure by the US for the appointment of a government favorable to imperialist power 3 reflects a clear method of colonialism today. After 9/11, liberal voices in the US began to recognize that imperialism was necessary; but, being liberals, they called it “reluctant” or “light” imperialism. No matter what it is called, imperialism implies colonialism in some form, as it is difficult to imagine any empire without colonies, even if colonies take different shapes at different points in history.4

Mignolo, William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature at Duke University, 2005 (Walter, The Idea of Latin America, page 6-8, RH)

it is important to conceptualize “modernity/coloniality” as two sides of the same coin and not as two separate frames of mind: you cannot be modern without being colonial; if you are on the colonial side of the spectrum you have to transact with modernity – you cannot ignore it. The very idea of America cannot be separated from coloniality: the entire continent emerged as such in the European consciousness as a massive extent of land to be appropriated and of people to be converted to Christianity, and whose labor could be exploited. While “colonialism” refers to specific historical periods and places of imperial domination coloniality” refers to the logical structure of colonial domination underlying the Spanish, Dutch, British, and US control of the Atlantic economy and politics, and from there the control and management of almost the entire planet. In each of the particular imperial periods of colonialism the same logic was maintained; only power changed hands. Some would say that the US was not an imperial country because it has no colonies like those of Spain or England. This opinion, however, confuses “colonialism” with having “colonies” And it confuses also “colonialism” with “coloniality.” Coloniality is the logic of domination in the modern/ colonial world, beyond the fact that the imperial/colonial country was once Spain, then England and now the US Modern technology, alongside political and economic restructuring in the second half of the twentieth century, has made it unnecessary to colonize in the old, more obvious, manner. Still, the US does in fact maintain military bases in strategic parts of the world the occupation of Iraq reflects a clear method of colonialism today. liberals, called it “reluctant” or “light” imperialism. No matter what it is called, imperialism implies colonialism in some form, as it is difficult to imagine any empire without colonies, even if colonies take different shapes at different points in history

After the colonies, only power changed hands, but the same colonial domination remained. Coloniality refers to the continual European domination of the world.

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

Far from offering an adequate way of understanding the complex U.S. race and ethnic relations, such a multicultural model explains away racial inequality--even in the midst of its continuing violence to peoples of color. Thus by privileging the site of culture in the struggle for political power, San Juan challenges the putative and apolitical status of cultural theory, exposing the liberal ideology that informs it. The most stringent critique sustained throughout the book is of the "ethnicity school," represented by Werner Sollor's Beyond Ethnicity, the prominent journal MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States), and Nathan Glazer's and Daniel Moynihan's Ethnicity: Theory and Experience, to name only a few of the major representative works San Juan discusses. What characterizes these studies is the underlying critical paradigm of the white immigrant success story. This standard is then applied uniformly to all racial and ethnic groups to explaining their experiences. This homogenization obscures the histories of exploitation and inequality experienced by colonized minorities, which differentiate them from white European immigrants or provide a context from which they can enunciate their specific interests and demands. The white immigrant paradigm spotlights a liberal ideology of equal opportunity, upward mobility, self-reliance and possessive individualism. It ignores the ongoing construction of racial categories and targeting of racialized groups for economic exploitation under capitalism. Thus, this paradigm ratifies the political expediency of blaming the victims rather than interrogating and transforming the structural conditions and ideological constraints--such as racism--of capitalism that systematically reproduce inequality and exploitive social relations. The ethnicity school theorizes ethnicity as an aspect of identity that individuals voluntarily adopt as a strategy of gaining power and privilege, overlooking the fact that colonized minorities were racialized by the dominant culture for purposes of labor exploitation. Building on Robert Blauner's distinction between immigrant and colonized minorities formulated in his classic Racial Oppression in America (1972), San Juan points out that the immigrant model disregards the different modes of entry into the U.S. economy experienced by white ethnics and people of color: The white European immigrant came voluntarily, even if pressured by economic or political conditions, while peoples of color were dominated through force and violence (Native Americans and Mexicans had their lands invaded; Africans were enslaved; Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos suffered under exclusion laws, etc.).The effective erasure of this difference by the ethnicity ideologues, San Juan asserts, has "provided the chief theoretical weapon for the neoconservative policy of the Reagan administration." He points specifically to the ethnicity paradigm's denial of the historical logic underwriting affirmative action policies. Recognizing the genocidal foundation of the U.S. nation and arguing that "American" national identity has historically been mediated through the language of race, San Juan privileges race against ethnicity as the analytical category most comprehensive of U.S. power relations. The ethnicity model cannot explain inequalities across ethnic boundaries without introducing the category of race, nor can it elucidate class inequality or provide a conceptual apparatus for theorizing the race-class nexus. By negating historically generated inequalities and cultural constraints, the ethnicity model curtails investigation of racial and class difference. Through exclusion and silencing, this model presents a monolithic version of "American" nationhood. Interrogating this "racializing national telos and its institutional relay in the disciplinary regime of the humanities," San Juan establishes the political nature of and necessity for intervention in humanistic studies. In this regard chapter 4, titled "Hegemony and Resistance: A Critique of Modern and Postmodern Cultural Theory in Ethnic Studies," offers a series of stunning critiques and textual readings in rethinking modernist and postmodernist theory toward the development of a Marxist strategy of "realizable social emancipation." The university is a foremost site of ideological production and struggle, as San Juan demonstrates by tracing the theoretical paradigms informing academic scholarship through to the formulation of public policy.

Libretti 96 (Tim, Ph.D., Professor at the University of Michigan in American Modernism and Minority Literatures, January-February 1996, Beyond Liberal Multiculturalism, http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/2485)

a multicultural model explains away racial inequality--even in the midst of its continuing violence to peoples of color. . The most stringent critique is of the "ethnicity school," represented by Werner Sollor's Beyond Ethnicity, the prominent journal MELUS ( and representative works . the critical paradigm of the white immigrant success story is then applied uniformly to all racial and ethnic groups to explaining their experiences homogenization obscures the histories of exploitation and inequality experienced by colonized minorities, . The white immigrant paradigm spotlights a liberal ideology of equal opportunity, upward mobility, self-reliance and possessive individualism It ratifies the political expediency of blaming the victims rather than interrogating and transforming the structural conditions and ideological constraints that systematically reproduce inequality and exploitive social relations The white European immigrant came voluntarily, even if pressured by economic or political conditions, while peoples of color were dominated through force and violence Recognizing the genocidal foundation of the U.S. nation and arguing that "American" national identity has historically been mediated through the language of race, San Juan privileges race against ethnicity as the most comprehensive of U.S. power relations The ethnicity model cannot explain inequalities across ethnic boundaries without introducing race, nor can it elucidate class inequality or provide a conceptual apparatus for theorizing the race-class nexus By negating historically generated inequalities and cultural constraints, the ethnicity model curtails investigation of racial and class difference. Through exclusion and silencing, this model presents a monolithic version of "American" nationhood The university is a foremost site of ideological production and struggle by tracing the theoretical paradigms informing academic scholarship through to the formulation of public policy

The ethnicity paradigmof the permutation obscurely homogenizes colonial history of exploitation and raciailized difference

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

A “material genealogy” of postcolonialism is, to reiterate the point upon which we began, complicated by the disparity between its generative principle – the sweeping history that the term invokes, if often unintentionally – and the narrow, intramural sphere in which postcolonialism is talked about and practiced. To fully reconstruct such a genealogy would require us to go on at considerable length about “Commonwealth Studies,” “Colonial Discourse Analysis” symposia, competing postcolonial anthologies, Australian academic clearing-houses, and the like. I take as given here a readerly consensus that there is no time for this – but also that the hypermediated relationship of postcolonialism to secular realities, if carefully abbreviated, will allow us to make some important connections in what follows. In the small world within which volumes like this one are likely to circulate we are now accustomed to speak in the same breath of Bhabha and Fanon, Said and Walter Rodney (i.e., the reader and the read), when a single step outside its walls suffices for these pairings to seem quizzical, and another for them to become incomprehensible. But the fact that relatively few read the reader does not ipso facto invalidate the reading nor prevent its genealogical investigation and assessment. To reiterate further: at some point over the last two decades the same, small but significant class of intellectuals that had learned in the 1960s to say “third world” became more hestitant about saying it. “Postcolonial,” a term with far more ambiguous political resonances, fit this hesitation much better and, beginning in the early 1980s, gradually replaced “third world,” at least in some contexts. (A similar story could be recounted about “cultural studies” as a euphemistic substitution for “Marxist literary criticism” and even “Critical Theory.”) The question for us here is what major historical shift prompted this minor terminological one (among others), and how such a shift effected conceptions, both popular and intellectual, of the entity that is still really at issue here: the nation.

Larsen 05 (Neil, Professor of Comparative Literature, 2005, “Imperialism, Colonialism, Postcolonialism”, A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, P.g 40)

A “material genealogy” of postcolonialism is, complicated by the disparity between its generative principle the sweeping history that the term invokes if often unintentionally – and the narrow, intramural sphere in which postcolonialism is talked about and practiced. at some point over the last two decades the small but significant class of intellectuals that had learned in the 1960s to say “third world” became more hestitant about saying it. “Postcolonial,” a term with far more ambiguous political resonances, fit this hesitation much better , beginning in the early 1980s, gradually replaced “third world,” at least in some contexts. The question for us here is what major historical shift prompted this minor terminological one (among others), and how such a shift effected conceptions, both popular and intellectual, of the entity that is still really at issue here: the nation.

Postcolonial is a euphemism for the third world reinstalling the nation.

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

But this apparent emptying out of the nation as a historically emancipatory space has not, at least on the phenomenological level, enforced a reconciliation of critical consciousness with “really existing” globalization. For one might concede the actuality of the latter as a kind of total system and yet still – following in the philosophical vein of a Nietzsche, for example – posit an opposing principle outside this, or any, system. Metropolitan critical consciousness, at least of the academic kind, has for a generation or more been intimate with a modern variation of such antisystemic critique in the form of poststructuralism. Suppose the globally dominant system could be likened to “discourse” in the Foucaultian sense. This would enable one to account for the seeming absence of the nation as “historical spatiality,” given that the elements of a discursive system bear only a structural, not spatial or temporal relation to that system. Add to this the idea, intellectually popularized by theorists such as Foucault and Derrida, that, while strictly speaking nothing can be outside a discursive system, every such system has built into it an antisystemic principle, a law of “differance” or a selfreproducing gap that continuously threatens to undermine it. Suppose further that the “nation” or its equivalent for contemporary anticolonialism and antiimperialism were this sort of antisystemic principle – would not, then, the tables be turned, or at least turnable, on “globalization”? The reader may have recognized by now the general theoretical orientation of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), the work from which virtually all contemporary postcolonial theory derives. The discourse named in its title is one that has, purportedly since the time of Aeschylus, constructed the Orient not as a “free subject of thought and action” (3) but as a mere effect, internal to this discourse, and justifying “in advance” (39) the Western colonization of the East. In an incorporation of the Foucault of Discipline and Punish Said also equates orientalism with a “power/knowledge” for which the Western cognition of a simulacrum called, say, “Egypt” is always already inseparable from the colonization and domination of the real Egypt. Thus “discourse” (orientalism) and a secular, historical reality (the Western colonization of the East) are, while not formally collapsed into each other, nevertheless indistinguishable from the standpoint of their object. They are two facets of a single, encompassing system that itself never comes to know or truthfully represent the “other” against which it is arrayed. Gaining the standpoint of this object would, if possible, be tantamount to subverting the “discourse” that – if we follow strictly the logic of Orientalism’s Foucaultian conception – conditions the possibility of the object’s colonization.

Larsen 05 (Neil, Professor of Comparative Literature, 2005, “Imperialism, Colonialism, Postcolonialism”, A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, P.g 45)

apparent emptying out of the nation as a historically emancipatory space has not enforced a reconciliation of critical consciousness with “really existing” globalization. Suppose the globally dominant system could be likened to “discourse” in the Foucaultian sense . The discourse has, constructed the Orient not as a “free subject of thought and action” but as a mere effect, internal to this discourse, and justifying “in advance” the Western colonization of the East. Thus “discourse and a secular, historical reality ) are, indistinguishable from the standpoint of their object. They are two facets of a single, encompassing system that itself never comes to know or truthfully represent the “other” against which it is arrayed. Gaining the standpoint of this object would, if possible, be tantamount to subverting the “discourse” that – conditions the possibility of the object’s colonization.

Use of postcolonialism leads to a misrepresentation of the “other”

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

The unwillingness to engage in this sort of sorting exercise which might expose definite “sides” to a struggle, has evoked charges of “complicity” on the part of critics of postcolonial discourse.32 While, as I have noted above, Marxists are often charged with remaining within a “colonial” binary logic, Postcolonial theorists have been charged with engaging in a theoretical exercise which encourages an exploitative status quo. Masao Miyoshi (1996), for example, has argued that when we fail to consider “political and economic inequalities” – and the causes for them – and engage in discourses of “postcoloniality” (which for him implies – falsely – the end of colonialism in a neocolonial world) “we are fully collaborating with the hegemonic ideology, which looks, as usual, as if it were no ideology at all” (98). Similarly, Arif Dirlik (1994b: 356) suggests that Postcolonial critics . . . in their repudiation of structure and affirmation of the local in problems of oppression and liberation, . . . have mystified the ways in which totalizing structures persist in the midst of apparent disintegration and fluidity. They have rendered into problems of subjectivity and epistemology concrete and material problems of the everyday world. While capital in its motions continues to structure the world, refusing it foundational status renders impossible the cognitive mapping that must be the point of departure for any practice of resistance and leaves such mapping as there is in the domain of those who manage the capitalist world economy. For Dirlik, this state of affairs means that “postcoloniality is the condition of the intelligentsia of global capitalism,” whose ends they further however unwittingly.

Bartolovich 05 (Crystal, Associate Professor of English, 2005, “Global Capital and Transitions”, A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, P.g 140)

Postcolonial theorists have been charged with engaging in a theoretical exercise which encourages an exploitative status quo when we fail to consider “political and economic inequalities” – and the causes for them – and engage in discourses of “postcoloniality falsely we are fully collaborating with the hegemonic ideology, which looks as if it were no ideology at all” Postcolonial critics have rendered into problems of subjectivity and epistemology concrete and material problems of the everyday world. While capital in its motions continues to structure the world, refusing it foundational status renders impossible the cognitive mapping that must be the point of departure for any practice of resistance and leaves such mapping as there is in the domain of those who manage the capitalist world economy. this state of affairs means that “postcoloniality is the condition of the intelligentsia of global capitalism,” whose ends they further however unwittingly.

Postcolonial studies leads to capitalist contributing to the exploitation of Latin America.

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

Since, on one level, the "post" signifies "after," it potentially inhibits forceful articulations of what one might call "neocoloniality." Formal independence for colonized countries has rarely meant the end of First World hegemony. Egypt's formal independence in 1923 did not prevent European, especially British, domination which provoked the 1952 revolution. Anwar Sadat's opening to the Americans and the Camp David accords in the seventies were perceived by Arab intellectuals as a reversion to pre-Nasser imperialism, as was Egyptian collaboration with the U.S. during the Gulf war.8 The purpose of the Carter Doctrine was to partially protect perennial U.S. oil interests (our oil) in the Gulf, which, with the help of petro-Islamicist regimes, have sought the control of any force that might pose a threat.9 In Latin America, similarly, formal "creole" independence did not prevent Monroe Doctrine-style military interventions, or Anglo-American free-trade hegemony. This process sets the history of Central and South America and the Caribbean apart from the rest of the colonial settler-states; for despite shared historical origins with North America, including the genocide of the indigenous population, the enslavement of Africans, and a multi-racial/ethnic composition these regions have been subjected to political and economic structural domination, on some levels more severe, paradoxically, than that of recently independent Third World countries such as Libya and even India. Not accidentally, Mexican intellectuals and independent labor unions have excoriated the Gringostroika10 of the recent Trade Liberalization Treaty. Formal independence did not obviate the need for Cuban or Nicaraguan- style revolutions, or for the Independista movement in Puerto Rico. The term "revolution," once popular in the Third World context, specifically assumed a post-colonial moment, initiated by official independence, but whose content had been a suffocating neo-colonial hegemony. The term "post-colonial" carries with it the implication that colonialism is now a matter of the past, undermining colonialism's economic, political, and cultural deformative traces in the present. The "post-colonial" inadvertently glosses over the fact that global hegemony, even in the post-cold war era, persists in forms other than overt colonial rule. As a signifier of a new historical epoch, the term "post-colonial," when compared with neo-colonialism, comes equipped with little evocation of contemporary power relations; it lacks a political content which can account for the eighties and nineties-style U.S. militaristic involvements in Granada, Panama, and Kuwait-Iraq, and for the symbiotic links between U.S. political and economic interests and those of local elites. In certain contexts, furthermore, racial and national oppressions reflect clear colonial patterns, for example the oppression of blacks by Anglo-Dutch Europeans in South Africa and in the Americas, the oppression of Palestinians and Middle Eastern Jews by Euro-Israel. The "post-colonial" leaves no space, finally, for the struggles of aboriginals in Australia and indigenous peoples throughout the Americas, in other words, of Fourth World peoples dominated by both First World multinational corporations and by Third World nation-states.

Shohat 1992 [Ella, Prof. of Cultural Studies at NYU, 1992, “Notes on the "Post-Colonial" http://www.jstor.org/stable/466220?origin=JSTOR-pdf&, Accessed 7/8/13- JM]

Since "post" signifies "after," it potentially inhibits forceful articulations of what one might call "neocoloniality." independence for colonized countries has rarely meant the end of First World hegemony. In Latin America independence did not prevent Monroe Doctrine-style military interventions, or Anglo-American free-trade hegemony. This process sets the history of Central and South America the Caribbean apart from the rest of the colonial settler-states despite shared historical origins with North America these regions have been subjected to political and economic structural domination Mexican intellectuals and independent labor unions have excoriated the Gringostroika independence did not obviate the need for Cuban style revolutions The term "revolution assumed a post-colonial moment , but whose content had been a suffocating neo-colonial hegemony. post-colonial" carries with it the implication that colonialism is now a matter of the past, undermining colonialism's economic, political, and cultural deformative traces The "post-colonial" inadvertently glosses over the fact that global hegemony persists in forms other than overt colonial rule As a signifier of a new historical epoch, the term "post-colonial," when compared with neo-colonialism, comes equipped with little evocation of contemporary power relations; it lacks a political content which can account for the eighties and nineties-style U.S. militaristic involvements in Granada, Panama, and Kuwait-Iraq, and for the symbiotic links between U.S. political and economic interests and those of local elites. racial and national oppressions reflect clear colonial patterns, The "post-colonial" leaves no space, finally, for the struggles of aboriginals in Australia and indigenous peoples throughout the Americas, in other words, of Fourth World peoples dominated by both First World multinational corporations and by Third World nation-states.

Postcolonial assumes a “post” state of oppression that ignores ongoing violence

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

Before such questions can be raised, however, it is necessary to pay some critical attention to the mobility that has accrued in the category of postcolonialism. Where the term once referred exclusively to the discursive practices produced by the historical fact of prior colonization in certain geographically specific segments of the world, it is now more of an abstraction available for figurative deployment in any strategic redefinition of marginality. For example, when James Clifford elaborated his position on travelling theory during a recent seminar, he invariably substituted the metaphoric condition of postcoloniality for the obsolete binarism between anthropologist and native.' As with the decentering of any discourse, however, this reimaging of the postcolonial closes as many epistemological possibilities as it opens. On the one hand, it allows for a vocabulary of cultural migrancy, which helpfully derails the postcolonial condition from the strictures of national histories, and thus makes way for the theoretical articulations best typified by Homi Bhabha's recent anthology, Nation and Narration.2 On the other hand, the current metaphorization of postcolonialism threatens to become so amorphous as to repudiate any locality for cultural thickness. A symptom of this terminological and theoretical dilemma is astutely read in Kwame Anthony Appiah's essay, "Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?"3 Appiah argues for a discursive space-clearing that allows postcolonial discourse a figurative flexibility and at the same time reaffirms its radical locality within historical exigencies. His discreet but firm segregation of the postcolonial from the postmodern is indeed pertinent to the dangerous democracy accorded the coalition between postcolonial and feminist theories, in which

Suleri 1992 (Sara, professor of English at Yale University, special concerns include postcolonial literatures and theory, contemporary cultural criticism, literature and law, “Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 18, No. 4, Identities (Summer, 1992), pp. 758-9, The University of Chicago Press)

it is necessary to pay some critical attention to the mobility that has accrued in the category of postcolonialism Where the term once referred exclusively to the discursive practices produced by the historical fact of prior colonization in certain geographically specific segments of the world, it is now more of an abstraction available for figurative deployment in any strategic redefinition of marginality. As with the decentering of any discourse, however, this reimaging of the postcolonial closes as many epistemological possibilities as it opens. On the one hand, it allows for a vocabulary of cultural migrancy, which helpfully derails the postcolonial condition from the strictures of national histories, and thus makes way for the theoretical articulations the other hand, the current metaphorization of postcolonialism threatens to become so amorphous as to repudiate any locality for cultural thickness. A symptom of this terminological and theoretical dilemma segregation of the postcolonial from the postmodern is indeed pertinent to the dangerous democracy accorded the coalition between postcolonial and feminist theories, in which

Postcolonialism has become an abstraction whose amorphous nature stuns any ability at real resistance.

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As a result, postcolonial critics' refusal to define postcolonial theory in an unambiguous manner might not necessarily point to diversity or vitality, but rather to personal projects and games of identification. Any adequate analysis of the literature of postcolonial criticism cannot avoid highlighting the extent to which the intellectual rigor and development of this criticism are seriously circumscribed by ideological posturing, reifying critical jargon, and strategies of self-representation. It might well be that postcolonial criticism never intended to address directly the myriad problems of analyzing Third-World societies, but rather has been fascinated with theorizing structures of power and, by extension, the critic's position vis-a-vis these structures. This subtext informs a work such as Zantop's Colonial Fantasies (1997), where the German imaginaire is the focus of discussion rather than any historical colonial reality. A German fictional literature on colonialism is then telescoped to show the ways in which fantasies of power can function even in a vacuum. The Holocaust becomes the inevitable case where such fantasies are unleashed upon reality. Here, the logic of postcoloniality reaches its natural conclusion, where a text is only a text and refers to no historical action. No coloniality, no postcoloniality, just ruminations on fantasies of power. Postcolonial studies of this genre strike the old-fashioned pose of the European psychoanalyst who unmasks the cultural crime of deformation. They are based on the virtually self-explanatory phenomenon of cultural struggle and adjustment. Since the postcolonial subject/critic is someone with access to positional knowledge, the work of generations of nonpostcolonial scholars (Orientalists or others who fit only marginally into the construction of Orientalism) is not particularly important. Even those who made a genuine effort to bring cultures formerly called "Oriental" into the Euro-American continuum need not be examined. The postcolonial critic can dismiss this work as serving a decrepit ideology (Clark 23). Often the postcolonial critic is unaware that a body of scholarship written by area specialists pertaining to the topic even exists. In a quasimessianic manner, the postcolonial critic positions her/himself to speak for the Other. Since Spivak's subalterns theoretically are mute, she can effectively coopt their voice. In the process, she creates a need for the theorist (Spivak herself) who will determine the discourse of the victimized. This is, indeed, a slippery game. For the postcolonial critic, notions of voicelessness and absence serve to license the neglect of any texts ("archives," "voices," and "spaces") that contradict the theoretical script. At work here is the age-old problem of the engaged intellectual and the pretense that academic criticism can function as a political act and "textual culture" can displace "activist culture" (Ahmad 1). Rhetorical engagement should not present a blueprint for social change, especially when critics are often located far from the native sites they propose to analyze. It is true that the location of critics does not necessarily diminish their message. However, being rooted to the territory of one's origin also does not assure a "pure and authentic standpoint" (Michel 87). The problem is one of representation. Auto-minoritized (note: not necessarily minority) subjects assume roles as spokespersons for minority communities. Regardless of their own socio-economic status and privileges, they speak as/ for minorities and as representatives for a minority community and its victimization. They function as "victims in proxy" (Bahri 73). This role is rarely seriously challenged. Spivak will, on occasion, voice concern that some critics might lack the objectivity to conceptualize their Dasein, as if by projection she is absolved of accruing any blame herself. But this strategy of projection, utilized with such aplomb by Said to mask a multitude of sins, does not change the fact that victimization by proxy represents false consciousness.

Figueira 00 [Dorothy, PhD Comparative Literature University of Chicago, “The Profits of Postcolonialism,” Comparative Literature, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Summer, 2000), pp. 246-254, pp. 248-9]

, postcolonial critics' refusal to define postcolonial theory in an unambiguous manner might not necessarily point to diversity or vitality, but rather to personal projects and games of identification. analysis of the literature of postcolonial criticism cannot avoid highlighting the extent to which the intellectual rigor and development of this criticism are seriously circumscribed by ideological posturing, reifying critical jargon, and strategies of self-representation. It might well be that postcolonial criticism never intended to address directly the myriad problems of analyzing Third-World societies, but rather has been fascinated with theorizing structures of power and, by extension, the critic's position vis-a-vis these structures. No coloniality, no postcoloniality, just ruminations on fantasies of power. Postcolonial studies of this genre strike the old-fashioned pose of the European psychoanalyst who unmasks the cultural crime of deformation. They are based on the virtually self-explanatory phenomenon of cultural struggle and adjustment. Since the postcolonial subject/critic is someone with access to positional knowledge, the work of generations of nonpostcolonial scholars is not particularly important. Even those who made a genuine effort to bring cultures formerly called "Oriental" into the Euro-American continuum need not be examined. The postcolonial critic can dismiss this work as serving a decrepit ideology Often the postcolonial critic is unaware that a body of scholarship written by area specialists pertaining to the topic even exists. In a quasimessianic manner, the postcolonial critic positions her/himself to speak for the Other. For the postcolonial critic, notions of voicelessness and absence serve to license the neglect of any texts ") that contradict the theoretical script. At work here is the age-old problem of the engaged intellectual and the pretense that academic criticism can function as a political act and "textual culture" can displace "activist culture" Rhetorical engagement should not present a blueprint for social change, especially when critics are often located far from the native sites they propose to analyze. It is true that the location of critics does not necessarily diminish their message. However, being rooted to the territory of one's origin also does not assure a "pure and authentic standpoint" The problem is one of representation. Auto-minoritized subjects assume roles as spokespersons for minority communities. Regardless of their own socio-economic status and privileges, they speak as/ for minorities and as representatives for a minority community and its victimization. They function as "victims in proxy" But this strategy of projection, utilized with such aplomb by Said to mask a multitude of sins, does not change the fact that victimization by proxy represents false consciousness.

Postcolonialism is a self serving field

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The concept of the margin versus the center in postcolonial criticism, constructed upon Derrida's critique of logocentrism, allows the postcolonial critic not only to theorize always from the impregnable position of "the margin," but also to invoke "ambiguity," "binarism," and "splitting," etc. as constitutive of that margin and those that inhabit it. Therefore, the postcolonial theorist is not constrained to "stand" on particular ground or take up a position, but instead can "slide ceaselessly" (Bhabha 300). In Bhabha's work, Foucault is invoked to establish the disequilibrium of the modern state and Bhabha's conception of the marginality of the "people." Said and Bhabha accept Foucault's dubious claim that the most individualized group in modern society are the marginals yet to be integrated into the political totality. They attempt to validate interpretation from the margin, where "exiled" Third-World metropolitan intellectuals are the most authoritative voices. Said, in particular, positions the "migrant" or "traveler" as "our model for academic freedom" (cited in Krishnaswamy 127), hence his desire to auto-migrant himself in "biographical" accounts. Once the need for a "tribe of interpreters" has been established, the migrant/traveler critics can then set out on their annointed mission as the "translators of the dissemination of texts and discourses across cultures" (Bhabha 293). Traveling theory requires, among other things, "a kind of 'doubleness' in writing, a temporality of representation that moves between cultural formations and social processes without a 'centered' causal logic" (Bhabha 293). Here, Said, Spivak and Bhabha can be "located" at a place where theorists are necessary to interpret across cultures and academic disciplines without the inconvenience of having to pinpoint cultural particularities. The theorist can say whatever he or she likes, the only constraint, or test of validity, being that the proper cultural space is occupied and that the writing validates and promotes the ambiguity and contradictoriness of that position. The critic's location, in fact, often overrides the national historical situation and exegetical context. Because little reference is made to culturally specific details, the discourse of postcoloniality mimics colonial thinking. Although postcolonial theory problematizes the binaries of Western historicism, it still orders the globe according to the single binary opposition of the colonial and the postcolonial (McClintock 85). In this manner, the multitudinous cultures of the world are marked and marketed in postcolonial theory with their geopolitical distinctions telescoped into invisibility (McClintock 86). One colonial experience seems always to resemble another. Stripped of cultural specificity, postcolonial prognoses also have little to do with the Third-World reality. Relying on the experience of modern colonialism, the critic divides history into manageable and isolated segments, while at the same time arguing against the false homogenization of Orientalist projects (Bahri 52). A contextual and fragmentary analyses are accepted out of a deep cynicism regarding the Other as a fossilized object of clinical experimentation. Indiscriminately embracing the Other levels out the various competing Others. All postcolonial experiences are the same, since their actuality is never taken seriously. Thus, the unfortunate Jameson must be taken to task for assuming that all Third-World narratives function in the same way as national allegories, for what is truly important is that the Other always be perceived as correct, regardless of differences and histories, in order to fulfil the postcolonial critic's desire for a pure otherness in all of its pristine luminosity (Chow 45). This form of criticism exhibits an uncritical primitivism that privileges non-Western culture and glories in its presumptive, eventual-and always revolutionary-resurgence (Clark 44).

Figueira 00 [Dorothy, PhD Comparative Literature University of Chicago, “The Profits of Postcolonialism,” Comparative Literature, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Summer, 2000), pp. 246-254, 250-1]

The concept of the margin versus the center in postcolonial criticism, constructed upon Derrida's critique of logocentrism, allows the postcolonial critic not only to theorize always from the impregnable position of "the margin," but also to invoke "ambiguity," "binarism," and "splitting," etc. as constitutive of that margin and those that inhabit it. Therefore, the postcolonial theorist is not constrained to "stand" on particular ground or take up a position, but instead can "slide ceaselessly" They attempt to validate interpretation from the margin, where "exiled" Third-World metropolitan intellectuals are the most authoritative voices. Said, in particular, positions the "migrant" or "traveler" as "our model for academic freedom" hence his desire to auto-migrant himself in "biographical" accounts. Once the need for a "tribe of interpreters" has been established, the migrant/traveler critics can then set out on their annointed mission as the "translators of the dissemination of texts and discourses across cultures requires, among other things, "a kind of 'doubleness' in writing, a temporality of representation that moves between cultural formations and social processes without a 'centered' causal logic" Spivak and Bhabha can be "located" at a place where theorists are necessary to interpret across cultures and academic disciplines without the inconvenience of having to pinpoint cultural particularities. The theorist can say whatever he or she likes, the only constraint, or test of validity, being that the proper cultural space is occupied and that the writing validates and promotes the ambiguity and contradictoriness of that position. The critic's location, in fact, often overrides the national historical situation and exegetical context. Because little reference is made to culturally specific details, the discourse of postcoloniality mimics colonial thinking. Although postcolonial theory problematizes the binaries of Western historicism, it still orders the globe according to the single binary opposition of the colonial and the postcolonial In this manner, the multitudinous cultures of the world are marked and marketed in postcolonial theory with their geopolitical distinctions telescoped into invisibility ). One colonial experience seems always to resemble another. Stripped of cultural specificity, postcolonial prognoses also have little to do with the Third-World reality. Relying on the experience of modern colonialism, the critic divides history into manageable and isolated segments, while at the same time arguing against the false homogenization of Orientalist projects ). A contextual and fragmentary analyses are accepted out of a deep cynicism regarding the Other as a fossilized object of clinical experimentation. Indiscriminately embracing the Other levels out the various competing Others. All postcolonial experiences are the same, since their actuality is never taken seriously. for what is truly important is that the Other always be perceived as correct, regardless of differences and histories, in order to fulfil the postcolonial critic's desire for a pure otherness in all of its pristine luminosity This form of criticism exhibits an uncritical primitivism that privileges non-Western culture and glories in its presumptive, eventual-and always revolutionary-resurgence

Postcolonial Thought mimics colonial thought it criticizes and only uses the colonial Other as a justification for its existence.

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The postcolonial critic's personal search in this way masks a lack of calling or significance. The stakes are considerable: personal validation amidst an incestuously boundaried field, among other critics deemed worthy of making the call. The Other is eclipsed by the critic's conception of it-a conception whose major function is to validate the theorist within a community of theorists. The authoritative critic who has carefully picked through information provided by individuals writing in these postcolonial places provides the dominant voice (Sunder Rajan 603). Although postcolonial critics claim acuity vis-a-vis the intricacies of their readings (Sunder Rajan 603-5), their ignorance of key aspects in the narrative they seek to deconstruct can lead to gross distortions. However, these mistakes are neither given significance nor, for that matter, acknowledged because of the overriding importance assigned to the idealized image of the critic's own theory or of theory itself. This aestheticization of the critical project is truly "criticism for criticism's sake." Criticism becomes a language game played by theorists.

Figueira 00 [Dorothy, PhD Comparative Literature University of Chicago, “The Profits of Postcolonialism,” Comparative Literature, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Summer, 2000), pp. 246-254, pp. 251]

The Other is eclipsed by the critic's conception of it-a conception whose major function is to validate the theorist within a community of theorists. The authoritative critic who has carefully picked through information provided by individuals writing in these postcolonial places provides the dominant voice Although postcolonial critics claim acuity vis-a-vis the intricacies of their readings their ignorance of key aspects in the narrative they seek to deconstruct can lead to gross distortions. However, these mistakes are neither given significance nor, for that matter, acknowledged because of the overriding importance assigned to the idealized image of the critic's own theory or of theory itself. This aestheticization of the critical project is truly "criticism for criticism's sake." Criticism becomes a language game played by theorists.

Postcolonialism becomes a critic’s language game to avoid any confrontation with the Other.

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The hegemonic structures and conceptual frameworks generated over the last five hundred years cannot be vanquished by waving the magical wand of the "postcolonial." The 1992 unification of Europe, for example, strengthens cooperation among ex-colonizing countries such as Britain, France, Germany and Italy against illegal immigration, practicing stricter border patrol against infiltration by diverse Third World peoples: Algeri- ans, Tunisians, Egyptians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Indians, Turks, Senegalese, Malians, and Nigerians. The colonial master narrative, mean- while, is being triumphantly re-staged. Millions of dollars are poured into international events planned for the quincentenary of Columbus's so- called voyages of discovery, climaxing in the Grand Regatta, a fleet of tall ships from 40 countries leaving from Spain and arriving in New York Harbor for U.S. Independence Day, the Fourth of July. At the same time, an anti-colonial narrative is being performed via the view-from-the-shore projects, the Native American commemorations of annihilated communi- ties throughout the U.S. and the American continent, and plans for setting up blockades at the arrival of the replicas of Columbus's caravels, sailing into U.S. ports. What, then, is the meaning of "postcoloniality" when certain structural conflicts persist? Despite different historical contexts, the conflict between the Native American claim to their land as a sacred and communal trust and the Euro-American view of land as alienable property remains structurally the same. How then does one negotiate sameness and difference within the framework of a "post-colonial" whose "post" emphasizes rupture and deemphasizes sameness? Contemporary cultures are marked by the tension between the official end of direct colonial rule and its presence and regeneration through hegemonizing neo-colonialism within the First World and toward the Third World, often channelled through the nationalist patriarchal elites. The "colonial" in the "post-colonial" tends to be relegated to the past and marked with a closure - an implied temporal border that undermines a potential oppositional thrust. For whatever the philosophical connotations of the "post" as an ambiguous locus of continuities and discontinuities, "its denotation of "after" - the teleological lure of the "post" - evokes a celebratory clearing of a conceptual space that on one level conflicts with the notion of "neo." The "neo-colonial," like the "post-colonial" also suggests continuities and discontinuities, but its emphasis is on the new modes and forms of the old colonialist practices, not on a "beyond."

Shohat 1992 [Ella, Prof. of Cultural Studies at NYU, 1992, “Notes on the "Post-Colonial" http://www.jstor.org/stable/466220?origin=JSTOR-pdf&, Accessed 7/8/13- JM]

The hegemonic structures and conceptual frameworks generated over the last five hundred years cannot be vanquished by waving the magical wand of the "postcolonial. The colonial master narrative , is being triumphantly re-staged. Despite different historical contexts, the conflict between the Native American claim to their land as a sacred and communal trust and the Euro-American view of land as alienable property remains structurally the same Contemporary cultures are marked by the tension between the official end of direct colonial rule and its presence and regeneration through hegemonizing neo-colonialism within the First World and toward the Third World, often channelled through the nationalist patriarchal elites The "colonial" in the "post-colonial" tends to be relegated to the past and marked with a closure - an implied temporal border that undermines a potential oppositional thrust

Colonialism cannot be stopped- neocolonialism is being successfully channeled through nationalist patriarchal elites.

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The embattled and embalmed narrative of civilizational clash is often deployed to justify the reckless destruction of civilians who are suspected, by virtue of their culture (considered to be their ‘second nature’), of being tainted with the ‘guilt’ of their traditions and temperament. Only those societies of the North and the South, the East and West, which ensure the widest democratic participation and protection for their citizens – their majorities and minorities – are in a position to make the deadly difficult decisions that ‘just’ wars demand. To confront terror out of a sense of democratic solidarity rather than retaliation gives us some faint hope for the future, hope that we might be able to establish a vision of a global society, informed by civil liberties and human rights, that carries with it the shared obligations and responsibilities of common, collaborative citizenship.

Bhaba 2003 (Homi K, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities in the Department of English at Harvard, the Director of the Humanities Center and the Senior Advisor on the Humanities to the President and Provost at Harvard University, "Democracy De-realized." Diogenes 50.1 (2003): 27., pp27, http://dio.sagepub.com/content/50/1/27.full.pdf+html)

Only those societies of the North and the South, the East and West, which ensure the widest democratic participation and protection for their citizens – their majorities and minorities – are in a position to make the deadly difficult decisions that ‘just’ wars demand. To confront terror out of a sense of democratic solidarity rather than retaliation gives us some faint hope for the future, hope that we might be able to establish a vision of a global society, informed by civil liberties and human rights, that carries with it the shared obligations and responsibilities of common, collaborative citizenship.

Western states violence necessary evil for democracy

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[L]ike language, the nation is an invariable which cuts across modes of production . . . . We should not become obsessed by the determinate historical form of the nation-state but try to see what that form is made out of. It is created from a natural organization proper to homo sapiens, one through which life itself is rendered untouchable or sacred. This sacred character constitutes the real national question.21 Debray's focus is relevant here as an explanation in literary terms of the nation's universal appeal, and so locates the symbolic background of national fiction. The nation is not only a recent and transitory political form, but also responds to the 'twin threats of disorder and death' confronting all societies. Against these, the nation sets two 'anti-death processes': These are, first of all, a delimitation in time, or the assignation of origins, in the sense of an Ark. This means that society does not derive from an infinite regression of cause and effect. A point of origin is fixed, the mythic birth of the Polis, the birth of Civilization or of the Christian era, the Muslim Hegira, and so on. This zero point or starting point is what allows ritual repetition, the ritualization of memory, celebration, commemoration — in short, all those forms of magical behaviour signifying defeat of the irreversibility of time. The second founding gesture of any human society is its delimitation within an enclosed space. Here also there takes place an encounter with the sacred, in the sense of the Temple. What is the Temple, etymologically? It was what the ancient priest or diviner traced out, raising his wand heavenwards, the outline of a sacred space within which divination could be undertaken. This fundamental gesture is found at the birth of all societies, in their mythology at least. But the myth presence is an indication of something real.

Bhabha 1990 (Homi, Professor and Director of Humanities Center at Harvard University, “Nation and Narration”, p 51, AX)

the nation is an invariable which cuts across modes of production the nation-state is created from a natural organization proper to homo sapiens, one through which life itself is rendered sacred. This sacred character constitutes the real national question The nation is not only a political form, but also responds to the 'twin threats of disorder and death' confronting all societies. the nation sets two 'anti-death processes': These are a delimitation in time, or the assignation of origins society does not derive from an infinite regression of cause and effect. A point of origin is fixed, This starting point is what allows all those forms of magical behaviour signifying defeat of the irreversibility of time The second founding gesture of any human society is its delimitation within an enclosed space. This fundamental gesture is found at the birth of all societies,

The nation is key to order and safety in society-without it, destruction and death would happen.

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To these notions, and in order to assert the principles on which the integrity of nation and empire are based, Johnson returns the same, invariable reply. It is a matter of fact that governments are established, not on regular plans, but by chance or accident. It is a matter of fact that from wherever, in a narrowly theoretical light, governments should derive their authority, they derive it in practice from the respect which, by habit or custom, we pay them. It is not from an analysis of the principles of natural right, or of human nature imagined as uncontaminated by accident and contingency, that attempts at political reform should start; but from an understanding of how custom, or 'second nature' as it was proverbially defined, has differently modified the first, or essential and universal human nature, in different countries. For national customs and customary institutions so shape the mind of a nation that it may be said that they constitute a people as a nation. The effects of political reform on second nature are extremely hard to calculate, so that to reform the institutions of a nation is always to put its stability at risk; and it goes without saying for Johnson — though he says it often enough — that political stability is the greatest good that a government can secure to a people. To calculate the effects of reform on first nature, as the discourse of natural rights offers to do, is apparently a good deal easier, of course, but serves no serious purpose; for it assumes the impossible, that we can decompound an essential and universal human nature from the reality we actually perceive, which is of different nations differently modified by their different habits, customs, and institutions. It follows, for Johnson, that 'for the law to be known, is of more importance than to be right', and that 'all change is of itself an evil, which ought not to be hazarded but for evident advantage'.26

Bhabha 1990 (Homi, Professor and Director of Humanities Center at Harvard University, “Nation and Narration”, p 163, AX)

governments are established, not on regular plans, but by chance or accident. It is a matter of fact that from wherever, in a narrowly theoretical light, governments should derive their authority, they derive it in practice from the respect which, by habit or custom, we pay them. political stability is the greatest good that a government can secure to a people.

Governments are established because the people want them-in return, the government bring political stability back to the people.

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I consider postcolonialism as the cultural logic of this mixture and multilayering of forms taken as an essential ethos of late modernity, a logic distanced from its grounding in the unsynchronized interaction between colonial powers and colonized subalterns. The Indo-British critic Homi Bhabha, among others, has given ontological priority to the phenomenon of cultural difference between colonized and colonizer. The articulation of such difference in “in-between” places produces hybridization of identities: “It is in the emergence of the interstices—the overlap and displacement of domains of difference—that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated” (Bhabha 1994, 1-2). Since (following Wallerstein 1991) capital ethnicizes peoples to promote labor segmentation, hybridity and other differential phenomena result. But for Bhabha, ambivalence arises from the poststructuralist “difference of writing” that informs any cultural performance. Such performances are found in certain privileged positionalities and experiences: “the history of postcolonial migration, the narratives of cultural and political diaspora, the major social displacements of peasants and aboriginal communities, the poetics of exile, the grim prose of political and economic refugees.” (5) Alex Callinicos calls Bhabha's approach “an idealist reduction of the social to the semiotic.” (1995: 111) Indeterminacy, interruption of the signifying chain, aporia, endless displacements, translations, and negotiations characterize postcolonial literary theory and practice. Aijaz Ahmad (1996) points to the ambiguity of historical references in postcolonial discourse. In the discursive realm of floating signifiers and the language metaphor, the objective asymmetry of power and resources between hegemonic blocs and subaltern groups (racialized minorities in the metropoles and in the “third world”) disappears, as well as the attendant conflicts. Clearly this fixation on the manifestations of “unevenness” has undergone fetishization, divorced from its concrete social determinations. What postcolonial theory (Bhabha's practice is replicated in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Trinh Minh-ha, and others) seems to carry out in the name of individualist resistance is the valorization of reified immediacies—the symptomatic effects of colonization in various forms of “orientalisms” and strategies of adaptations and cooptations—unconnected with the institutions and instrumentalities that subtend them.

Juan 1998 [Jr., E San, Professor of Comparative American Cultures at Washington State U, “The Limits of Postcolonial Criticism: The Discourse of Edward Said,” http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/1781, Accessed: 7/12/13]

I consider postcolonialism as the cultural logic of this mixture and multilayering of forms taken as an essential ethos of late modernity, a logic distanced from its grounding in the unsynchronized interaction between colonial powers and colonized subalterns. critic Homi Bhabha, among others, has given ontological priority to the phenomenon of cultural difference between colonized and colonizer. The articulation of such difference in “in-between” places produces hybridization of identities: “It is in the emergence of the interstices—the overlap and displacement of domains of difference—that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated” capital ethnicizes peoples to promote labor segmentation, hybridity and other differential phenomena result. But for Bhabha, ambivalence arises from the poststructuralist “difference of writing” that informs any cultural performance. Such performances are found in certain privileged positionalities and experiences: “the history of postcolonial migration, the narratives of cultural and political diaspora, the major social displacements of peasants and aboriginal communities, the poetics of exile, the grim prose of political and economic refugees.” Bhabha's approach “an idealist reduction of the social to the semiotic.” (1995: 111) Indeterminacy, interruption of the signifying chain, aporia, endless displacements, translations, and negotiations characterize postcolonial literary theory and practice. this fixation on the manifestations of “unevenness” has undergone fetishization, divorced from its concrete social determinations. What postcolonial theory seems to carry out in the name of individualist resistance is the valorization of reified immediacies—the symptomatic effects of colonization in various forms of “orientalisms” and strategies of adaptations and cooptations—unconnected with the institutions and instrumentalities that subtend them.

Bhabha’s fixation on fluidity inscribes an academic colonialism that destroys any hope of postcolonial liberation.

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Viewed from the perspective of late-capitalist political economy, the figures of difference, fragmentation, liminality and diaspora, which Lawrence Grossberg (1996) considers the principles of identity for postmodern cultural studies (of which postcolonialism is a subspecies), are modes of regulating the social relations of production, in particular the division of global social labor and its reproduction. But postcolonial critics not only remove these principles of identity from their circumstantial ground, from their historical contexts; they also treat them as autonomous phenomena separate from the structures of cultural production and political legitimation in late modern societies. In the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre's words, “Each of these `moments' of the real [i.e. hybridity, fragmentation, etc.], once isolated and hypostatized, becomes the negator of the other moments and then the negator of itself. Limited and transposed into a form, the content becomes oppressive and destructive of its own reality.” (1968: 167) Postcolonialism is guilty of what it claims to repudiate: mystification and moralism. What postcolonialism ultimately tries to do is to reify certain transitory practices, styles, modalities of thought and expression that arise as attempts to resolve specific historical contradictions in the ongoing crisis of late, transnational capitalism. Cultural difference is the single ambivalent result of colonialism that can be articulated in plural ways. Unevenness is no longer an abstract categorizing term, but an empirical one-sided description that affords the subaltern's newly-discovered agency some space for the display of libertarian astuteness. What the Marxist theoretician Georg Lukacs (1971) calls “ethical utopianism,” the lapse into subjectivism, afflicts postcolonial theory because it denies the internally complex determinants that are its condition of possibility. This mediation of the hybrid, interstitial and borderline experience with the concrete totality of the social formation is rejected as “essentialism” or “totalization” (San Juan 1998).

Juan 1998 [Jr., E San, Professor of Comparative American Cultures at Washington State U, “The Limits of Postcolonial Criticism: The Discourse of Edward Said,” http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/1781, Accessed: 7/12/13]

postcolonial critics not only remove these principles of identity from their circumstantial ground, from their historical contexts; they also treat them as autonomous phenomena separate from the structures of cultural production and political legitimation in late modern societies. “Each of these `moments' of the real [i.e. hybridity, fragmentation, etc.], once isolated and hypostatized, becomes the negator of the other moments and then the negator of itself. Limited and transposed into a form, the content becomes oppressive and destructive of its own reality.” Postcolonialism is guilty of what it claims to repudiate: mystification and moralism. What postcolonialism ultimately tries to do is to reify certain transitory practices, styles, modalities of thought and expression that arise as attempts to resolve specific historical contradictions in the ongoing crisis of late, transnational capitalism. Cultural difference is the single ambivalent result of colonialism that can be articulated in plural ways. Unevenness is no longer an abstract categorizing term, but an empirical one-sided description that affords the subaltern's newly-discovered agency some space for the display of libertarian astuteness. complex determinants that are its condition of possibility. This mediation of the hybrid, interstitial and borderline experience with the concrete totality of the social formation is rejected as “essentialism” or “totalization”

Meditations on the hybrid and liminal space of postcolonialism lead to a mystification of the oppressed.

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

In fact, even if he saw himself as the Columbus of the unconscious, the founder of psychoanalysis never refers specifically to the realities of Latin America—at least not beyond his personal and anthropological interest in the culture of the Bolivian coca leaf. There are, to be sure, a number of eyebrow-raising assertions similar to what Marx or Engels have to say early on about Mexicans, as when Freud refers metaphorically to the unconscious, in his paper of the same title from 1915, by speaking of the mind’s ‘‘aboriginal population’’ or again, elsewhere, about the ‘‘dark continents.’’8 And in Freud’s case, too, we could try to systematize the underlying prejudices, aside from a certain metaphysical fixity of concepts, which lead to such affirmations: the universalist trend of his interpretation of evolution, with identical stages for all of humanity; the correspondence between the phylogenetic and the ontogenetic aspects of development, which leads to the utilization of metaphors of primitivism above all with reference to neurosis and the early stages of infanthood as in his 1913 text Totem and Taboo, significantly subtitled Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics; and the Lamarckian faith in the possibility of the hereditary transmission of acquired traits, which likewise renders superfluous the study of other or earlier cultures beyond the confines of modern Western Europe. ‘‘These assumptions,’’ as Celia Brickman sums up, ‘‘did not invalidate the potential of psychoanalysis, but their presence lent credence to readings of psychoanalysis that could perpetuate and seemingly legitimate colonialist representations of primitivity with their associated racist implications, in much the same way that psychoanalytic representations of femininity were able to be enlisted for some time as an ally in the subordination of women’’ (51).

Bosteels, 2011[Bruno, of Romance studies at Cornell University, June 1st 2011, “Critique of planned obsolescence: marx and freud in Latin America,” Revista Hispánica Moderna, 64: 1, page # 6-7, TZ]

the founder of psychoanalysis never refers specifically to the realities of Latin America—at least not beyond his personal and anthropological interest in the culture of the Bolivian coca leaf Freud refers metaphorically to the unconscious, in his paper of the same title from 1915, by speaking of the mind’s ‘‘aboriginal population’’ or again, elsewhere, about the ‘‘dark continents.’’8 And in Freud’s case, too, we could try to systematize the underlying prejudices, aside from a certain metaphysical fixity of concepts, which lead to such affirmations: the universalist trend of his interpretation of evolution, with identical stages for all of humanity; the correspondence between the phylogenetic and the ontogenetic aspects of development, which leads to the utilization of metaphors of primitivism above all with reference to neurosis and the early stages of infanthood as in his 1913 text Totem and Taboo, significantly subtitled Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics; These assumptions, not invalidate the potential of psychoanalysis their presence lent credence to readings of psychoanalysis that could perpetuate and seemingly legitimate colonialist representations of primitivity with their associated racist implications, in much the same way that psychoanalytic representations of femininity were able to be enlisted for some time as an ally in the subordination of women’’

Postcolonialism’s reliance on psychoanalysis misreads the Latin American context and reinscribes coloniality

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

The history of the West and the history of the non-West are by now irrevocably different and irrevocably shared. Both have shaped and been shaped by each other in specific and specifiable ways. The linear time of the West or the project of modernity did not simply mummify or overlay the indigenous times of colonized countries, but was itself open to alteration and reentered into discrete cultural combinations. Thus the history of Latin America is also the history of the West and informs its psychic and economic itinerary. The cultural projects of both the West and the non-West are implicated in a larger history. If the crisis of meaning in the West is seen as the product of a historical conjuncture, then perhaps the refusal either to export it or to import it may be a meaningful gesture, at least until we can replace the stifling monologues of self and other (which, however disordered or decentered, remain the orderly discourses of the bourgeois subject) with a genuinely dialogic and dialectical history that can account for the formation of different selves and the construction of different epistemologies.

Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 95 (Bill, Gareth, Helen, Professors at the University of NSW, University of Western Australia, Queen’s University, The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, p. 147, AM)

The history of the West and the history of the non-West have shaped and been shaped by each other The linear time of the West did not simply mummify or overlay the indigenous times of colonized countries, but was open to alteration and cultural combinations. the history of Latin America is also the history of the West and informs its psychic and economic itinerary. The cultural projects of both the West and the non-West are implicated in a larger history. we can replace the stifling monologues of self and other with a genuinely dialogic and dialectical history that can account for the formation of different selves and the construction of different epistemologies.

The histories of the oppressive are not meant to be separate entities used to create dichotomous positions of power or inferiority

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

To pose the crisis of democracy in terms of its unrealized ideals does not adequately challenge the failures of its promise. ‘Falling short’ is often a strategic ‘necessity’ for democratic discourse, which acknowledges failure as part of its evolutionary, utopian narrative. The argument goes something like this: we fail because we are mortal and bound to history, the faith of democracy lies not in perfectibilty but in our perseverence and progress, our commitment to set the highest ideals before ourselves and struggle towards them to revise and reshape our ‘best selves’. Such an internal dialectic of the ‘unrealized’ and the ‘utopian’ encounters the negative instance of ‘failure’ only in order to provide a strange moral coherence and consolation for itself. I would thus propose that we consider democracy as something de-realized rather than unrealized. I use ‘de-realization’ in the sense of Bertolt Brecht’s concept of distantiation – a critical ‘distance’ or alienation disclosed in the very naming of the formation of the democratic experience and its expressions of equality. I also use ‘derealization’ in the surrealist sense of placing an object, idea, image or gesture in a context not of its making, in order to defamiliarize it, to frustrate its naturalistic and normative ‘reference’ and see what potential that idea or insight has for ‘translation’, in the sense both of genre and geopolitics, territory and temporality. If we attempt to de-realize democracy, by defamiliarizing its history and its political project, we recognize not its failure but its frailty, its fraying edges or limits that impose their will of inclusion and exclusion on those who are considered – on the grounds of their race, culture, gender or class – unworthy of the democratic process. In these dire times of global intransigence and war, we recognize what a fragile thing democracy is, how fraught with limitations and contradictions; and yet it is in that fragility, rather than in failure, that its creative potential for coping with the trials of the new century lies.

Bhaba 2003 (Homi K, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities in the Department of English at Harvard, the Director of the Humanities Center and the Senior Advisor on the Humanities to the President and Provost at Harvard University, "Democracy De-realized." Diogenes 50.1 (2003): pp28-9, http://dio.sagepub.com/content/50/1/27.full.pdf+html)

To pose the crisis of democracy in terms of its unrealized ideals does not adequately challenge the failures of its promise. ‘Falling short’ is often a strategic ‘necessity’ for democratic discourse, which acknowledges failure as part of its evolutionary, utopian narrative. . Such an internal dialectic of the ‘unrealized’ and the ‘utopian’ encounters the negative instance of ‘failure’ only in order to provide a strange moral coherence and consolation for itself. consider democracy as something de-realized rather than unrealized de-realization’ in the sense of Brecht’s concept of distantiation – a critical ‘distance’ or alienation disclosed in the very naming of the formation of the democratic experience and its expressions of equality ‘derealization’ in the surrealist sense of placing an object, idea, image or gesture in a context not of its making, in order to defamiliarize it, to frustrate its naturalistic and normative ‘reference’ and see what potential that idea or insight has for ‘translation’, in the sense both of genre and geopolitics, territory and temporality. If we attempt to de-realize democracy, by defamiliarizing its history and its political project, we recognize not its failure but its frailty, its fraying edges or limits that impose their will of inclusion and exclusion on those who are considered – on the grounds of their race, culture, gender or class – unworthy of the democratic process. In these dire times of global intransigence and war, we recognize what a fragile thing democracy is, how fraught with limitations and contradictions; and yet it is in that fragility, rather than in failure, that its creative potential for coping with the trials of the new century lies.

Failure to achieve the desired result in democracy is not a reason to reject democracy perm can be the unrealized.

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

From the 'post-structuralist' perspective assumed earlier, we can see that this theory presupposes that letters arrive at their destination. If this were so, then the desire of politics to end the post would have been achieved, and there would be no need of politics at all — if the legislative letter always reached its destination (always in fact being returned to the sender), then there would be no need for it to be sent, for it would have always already arrived. The fact that this is not the case is sufficiently proved by the existence of Rousseau's theories, which presuppose that politics has come adrift from the natural network and can only attempt to reproduce it in the form of a radical fiction.25 The immediate implication is that politics is a name for the necessary possibility of the failure of autonomy to close into the circuit which names the citizen as citizen, and that the designation 'citizen' is always inhabited by an element of impropriety. This impropriety is both the condition of possibility of politics and the reason why autonomy can never be achieved: this margin, which can be called 'freedom', is also the ground of differentiation which allows for the fact that 'citizens' are always in fact bearers of so-called 'proper names', and are not just isomorphic points. Rousseau also recognizes this in so far as he cannot let the law remain in its pure generality, but formulates the need for a government or executive power to allow its particular applications: the government being something like a central sorting office, 'an intermediary body established between the subjects and the Sovereign for their mutual correspondence'.26 But more importantly for our concerns here, this necessary failure of autonomy also denies the absolute closure of the circuit of the general will in the form of the absolutely autonomous state. If the doctrine of the general will were not troubled by the necessary possibility of the letter's not arriving, then the state would be absolute and have no relation to any outside: it could not strictly speaking be a nation, and it would have no history, and thus no narration.27 In order to have a name, a boundary and a history to be told at the centre, the state must be constitutively imperfect. The closure of the state becomes the frontier of the nation, and, as we have seen, the frontier implies that there is more than one nation.

Bhabha 1990 (Homi, Professor and Director of Humanities Center at Harvard University, “Nation and Narration”, p 129-130, AX)

politics is a name for the necessary possibility of the failure of autonomy to close into the circuit which names the citizen as citizen, and that the designation 'citizen' is always inhabited by an element of impropriety. This impropriety is both the condition of possibility of politics and the reason why autonomy can never be achieved: this margin, which can be called 'freedom', is also the ground of differentiation which allows for the fact that 'citizens' are always in fact bearers of so-called 'proper names' Rousseau also recognizes he cannot let the law remain in its pure generality, but formulates the need for a government or executive power to allow its particular applications: the government being something like a central sorting office, 'an intermediary body established between the subjects and the Sovereign for their mutual correspondence' If the state would have no relation to any outside: it could not strictly speaking be a nation, and it would have no history, and thus no narration In order to have a name, a boundary and a history to be told at the centre, the state must be constitutively imperfect. The closure of the state becomes the frontier of the nation,

Politics and the government are necessary for the existence of a stable society simply because the government’s purpose is to maintain order in society.

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

In essence, the most blatant flaw of postcolonial orthodoxy (I use the rubric to designate the practice of Establishment postcolonialism employing a poststructuralist organon) lies in its refusal to grasp the category of capitalist modernities in all its global ramifications, both the regulated and the disarticulated aspects. A mechanistic formula is substituted for a dialectical analytic of historical motion. Consequently, in the process of a wide-ranging critique of the Enlightenment ideals by postcolonial critics, the antithesis of capitalism— proletarian revolution and the socialist principles first expounded by Marx and Engels—is dissolved in the logic of the global system of capital without further discrimination. The obsession to do away with totality, foundations, universals, and systemic analysis leads to a mechanical reification of ideas and terminology, as well as the bracketing of the experiences they refer to, culminating in a general relativism, skepticism, and nominalism—even nihilism —that undercuts the postcolonial claim to truth, plausibility, or moral high ground

Juan No Date (Epifanio San Juan, profesor of Comparative American Cultures at Washington State U, “POSTCOLONILAISM AND MATERIALISTIC DIALECTICS,” pg. 3, JC)

the most blatant flaw of postcolonial lies in its refusal to grasp the category of capitalist modernities in all its global ramifications both the regulated and the disarticulated aspects. A mechanistic formula is substituted for a dialectical analytic of historical motion. Consequently, in the process of a wide-ranging critique of the Enlightenment ideals by postcolonial critics, the antithesis of capitalism is dissolved in the logic of the global system of capital without further discrimination. The obsession to do away with totality, foundations, universals, and systemic analysis leads to a mechanical reification of ideas and terminology, as well as the bracketing of the experiences they refer to, culminating in a general relativism, skepticism, and nominalism that undercuts the postcolonial claim to truth, plausibility, or moral high ground

The rejection of the state guts any alt solvency – only perm can solve.

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

The subaltern group is deprived of historical [dominance] and initiative; it is often in a state of continuous but disorganic expansion, without a necessary party affiliation; and [crucially for the issue of de-nationalisation], its authority may not be able to go beyond a certain qualitative level which still remains below the level of the possession of the state.12 This includes those who are committed to cultural justice and the emancipatory work of the imagination. The utopian dream of ‘total’ transformation may not be available to the subaltern perspective which is nonetheless engaged in both struggles as an active inventory of emancipation and survival as modes of forbearance that link the memory of history to the future of freedom. Discourses that champion social ‘contradiction’ as the a priori motor of historical change are propelled in a linear direction towards the terminus of the state. The subaltern imaginary, deprived of political dominance and yet seeking to turn that disadvantage into a new vantage point, has to proceed at an oblique or adjacent angle in its antagonistic relation to ‘the qualitative level of the State’. Subalternity represents a form of contestation or challenge to the status quo that does not homogenize or demonize the state in formulating an opposition to it. The subaltern strategy intervenes in state practices from a position that is ‘contiguous’ or tangential to the ‘authoritarian’ institutions of the state – flying just below the level of the state. It is in this sense that the subaltern group is not a ‘sub-ordinate’ class. It propagates an ethico-political practice in the name of the ‘human’ where ‘rights’ are neither simply unversalist nor individuated. The ‘human’ signifies a strategic, translational sign that gives ground to, or gains ground for, emergent demands for representation, redistribution and responsibility – claims of the excluded that come ‘from below the qualitative level of the state’; modes of community and solidarity that are not fully sanctioned by the sovereignty of the state; forms of freedom unprotected by it. Such an ‘opposition in terms of human rights’, Claude Lefort argues, takes form in centers that power cannot entirely master . . . From the legal recognition of strikes or trade unions, to rights relative to work of social security, there has developed on the basis of the rights of man a whole history that transgressed the boundaries within which the state claimed to define itself, a history that remains open.13

Bhaba 2003 (Homi K, 2003, "Democracy De-realized." Diogenes 50.1 (2003): 27-35. http://dio.sagepub.com/content/50/1/27.full.pdf+html)(pg. 31)

The subaltern group is deprived of historical [dominance] and initiative its authority may not be able to go beyond a certain qualitative level which still remains below the level of the possession of the state The utopian dream of ‘total’ transformation may not be available to the subaltern perspective which is nonetheless engaged in both struggles as an active inventory of emancipation and survival as modes of forbearance that link the memory of history to the future of freedom. Subalternity represents a form of contestation or challenge to the status quo that does not homogenize or demonize the state in formulating an opposition to it. The subaltern strategy intervenes in state practices from a position that is ‘contiguous’ or tangential to the ‘authoritarian’ institutions of the state – flying just below the level of the state. the subaltern group is not a ‘sub-ordinate’ class. ropagates an ethico-political practice in the name of the ‘human’ where ‘rights’ are neither simply unversalist nor individuated. there has developed on the basis of the rights of man a whole history that transgressed the boundaries within which the state claimed to define itself, a history that remains open

The state is not over determined in dealing with the subaltern, a history remains open for future acts of justice.

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

These paradoxes incite a certain ambivalence and anxiety about freedom in which we dwell especially uncomfortably today. The pursuit of political freedom is necessarily ambivalent because it is at odds with security, stability, protection, and irresponsibility; because it requires that we surrender the conservative pleasures of familiarity, insularity, and routine for investment in a more open horizon of possibility and sustained willingness to risk identity, both collective and individual Freedom thus conceived is at odds with the adolescent pleasures held out liberal formulations of liberty as license. Indeed, the admonition to adolescents that "with freedom comes responsibilities'' misses the point of this investment insofar as it isolates freedom from responsibility. The notion that there is a debt to pay for spending, a price to pay for indulgence, a weight to counter lightness already casts freedom as a matter of lightness, spending, indulgence-just the thing for adolescents or the relentlessly self-interested subject of liberalism. Freedom of the kind that seeks to set the terms of social existence requires inventive and careful use of power rather than rebellion against authority; it is sober, exhausting, and without parents. "For what is freedom." Nietzsche queries in Twilight of the Idols but "that one has the will to assume responsibility for oneself. " ' Freedom is a project suffused not just with ambivalence but with anxiety, because it is flanked the problem of power on all sides: the powers against which It arrays itself as well as the power it must claim to enact itself. Against the liberal presumption that freedom transpires where power leaves off, I want to insist that freedom neither overcomes nor eludes power; rather, it requires for its sustenance that we take the full measure of power's range and appearances-the powers that situate, constrain, and produce subjects as well as the will to power entailed in practicing freedom. Here again, freedom emerges as that which is never achieved; instead, it is a permanent struggle against what will otherwise be done to and for us. "How is freedom measured in individuals and peoples?” Nietzsche and answers, "according to the resistance which must be overcome, to the exertion required to remain on top ... The free man is a warrior.'' If freedom is invariably accompanied by ambivalence and anxiety, these concomitants are magnified today both because of the kind of subjects we arc and because of the particular figure of freedom required to counter contemporary forms of domination and regulation. The dimensions of responsibility for oneself and one's world that freedom demands often appear overwhelming and hopelessly unrealizable. They are overwhelming because history has become so fully secularized: there is nobody here but us-no "structures," no supervening agent, no cosmic force, no telos upon which we may count for assistance in realizing our aims or to which we may assign blame for failing to do so. Yet they are hopelessly unrealizable for an apparently opposite reason: the powers and histories by which the social, political, and economic world are knit together are so intricately globalized that it is difficult for defeatism not to
preempt the desire to act. Moreover, bereft of the notion that history
''progresses," or even that humans learn from history's most nightmarish
episodes, we suffer a contemporary "disenchantment of the world" more
vivid than Weber let alone Marx ever imagined. This is not so much
nihilism-the oxymoronic belief in barely masked
despair about the meanings and events that humans have generated. It is
 as if, notwithstanding the pervasiveness of nonteleological discourses of
contingency, arbitrariness, and intervention, we were steeped in a consciousness of antiprogess. “What a ghastly century we have lived in,” Cornel West ruminates, “there are misanthropic skeletons hanging in our closer…[W]e have given up on the capacity of human beings to do anything right[,]…of human communities to solve any problem.” If generic anxieties and ambivalence about freedom have intensified for the reasons sketched in this chapter, they make still more understandable the tendency of late-twentieth-century “progressives” to turn back from substantive ambitions of politics of freedom. But the consequences of such a retreat are traumatic for democratic thinking and projects, and they are not limited to the uncritical statism and attachments to redistributive justice characteristics of social democrats who call themselves radical. Rather, as chapters 2 and 3 of this work argue, the “instinct for freedom turned back on itself” surfaces in the form of a cultural ethos and politics of reproach, rancor, moralism, and guilt—the constellation detailed by Nietzsche’s account of ressentiment. Nietzsche regarded our fundamental ambivalence about freedom—its demanding invocation of power and action—as capable of producing entire social formations, entire complexes or moral and political discourses, that denigrate the project of freedom rather than attempt it. For Nietzsche, when the negative moment in our ambivalence about freedom is ascendant, the will to power is redirected as a project of antifreedom; it takes the form of re- crimination against action and power, and against those who affirm or embody the possibilities of action and power. There is a second and related reason tor taking up with Nietzsche in the
ensuing reflections on contemporary forms of political life. His thought
is useful in understanding the source and consequences of a contemporary tendency to moralize in the place of political argument, and to understand the codification of injury and powerlessness-the marked turn away from freedom's pursuit-that this kind of moralizing politics entails. Examples of this tendency abound, but it is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the contemporary proliferation of efforts to pursue legal redress tor injuries related to social subordination by marked attributes or behaviors: race, sexuality, and so forth,-16 This effort, which strives to establish racism, sexism, and homophobia as morally heinous in the law, and to prosecute its individual perpetrators there, has many of the attributes of what Nietzsche named the politics of ressentiment: Developing a righteous critique of power from the perspective of the injured, it delimits a specific site of blame for suffering by constituting sovereign subjects and events as responsible for the “injury” of social subordination. It fixes the identities of the injured and the injuring as social positions, and codifies as well the meanings of their actions against all possibilities of indeterminacy, ambiguity, and struggle for resignification or repositioning. This effort also casts the law in particular and the state more generally as neutral arbiters of injury rather than as themselves invested with the power to injure. Thus, the effort to “outlaw” social injury powerfully legitimizes law and the state as appropriate protectors against injury and casts injured individuals as needing such protection by such protectors. Finally, in its economy of perpetrator and victim, this projects seeks not power or emancipation for the injured or the subordinated, but the revenge of punishment, making the perpetrator hurt as the sufferer does.

Brown 95 (Wendy Brown PhD Political Philosophy, professor of political science Berkeley “States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity” pp. 24-27)

The pursuit of political freedom is necessarily ambivalent because it is at odds with security, stability, protection, and irresponsibility it requires that we surrender the conservative pleasures of familiarity, insularity, and routine for investment in a more open horizon of possibility and sustained willingness to risk identity the admonition to adolescents that "with freedom comes responsibilities'' misses the point of this investment insofar as it isolates freedom from responsibility Freedom is a project suffused not just with ambivalence but with anxiety, because it is flanked the problem of power on all sides Against the liberal presumption that freedom transpires where power leaves off freedom neither overcomes nor eludes power; rather, it requires for its sustenance that we take the full measure of power's range and appearances-the powers that situate, constrain, and produce subjects as well as the will to power entailed in practicing freedom it is a permanent struggle against what will otherwise be done to and for us How is freedom measured in individuals and peoples? Nietzsche answers, "according to the resistance which must be overcome, to the exertion required to remain on top ... The free man is a warrior.'' The dimensions of responsibility for oneself and one's world that freedom demands often appear overwhelming and hopelessly unrealizable. They are overwhelming because history has become so fully secularized: there is nobody here but us no cosmic force, no telos upon which we may count for assistance in realizing our aims or to which we may assign blame for failing to do so. the powers and histories by which the social, political, and economic world are knit together are so intricately globalized that it is difficult for defeatism not to
preempt the desire to act. If generic anxieties and ambivalence about freedom have intensified they make still more understandable the tendency of late-twentieth-century “progressives” to turn back from substantive ambitions of politics of freedom. the consequences of such a retreat are traumatic for democratic thinking and projects, and they are not limited to the uncritical statism and attachments to redistributive justice characteristics of social democrats who call themselves radical. the “instinct for freedom turned back on itself” surfaces in the form of ressentiment Nietzsche regarded our fundamental ambivalence about freedom as capable of producing entire social formations, entire complexes or moral and political discourses, that denigrate the project of freedom rather than attempt it when the negative moment in our ambivalence about freedom is ascendant, the will to power is redirected as a project of antifreedom; Nietzsche is useful in understanding the source and consequences of a contemporary tendency to moralize in the place of political argument Examples of this effort, which strives to establish racism, sexism, and homophobia as morally heinous in the law, and to prosecute its individual perpetrators there, has many of the attributes the politics of ressentiment: it delimits a specific site of blame for suffering by constituting sovereign subjects and events as responsible for the “injury” of social subordination. It fixes the identities of the injured and the injuring as social positions This casts the law and the state as neutral arbiters of injury rather than as themselves invested with the power to injure the effort to “outlaw” social injury powerfully legitimizes law and the state as appropriate protectors against injury and casts injured individuals as needing such protection by such protectors

Paradoxes in freedom redirect the will to power as a goal of antifreedom, causing identities to be fixed social positions.

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

“[W]hat the Left needs is a postindividualist concept of freedom, for it is still over questions of freedom and equality that the decisive ideological battles are being waged.” So argues Chantal Mouffe in response to two decades of conservative political and theoretical efforts to define and practice freedom in an individualist, libertarian mode, a phenomenon Stuart Hall calls "the great moving right show."5 Yet as Hall keenly appreciates, "concepts" of freedom, posited independently of specific analyses of contemporary modalities of domination, revisit us with the most troubling kind of idealism insofar as they deflect from the local, historical, and contextual character of freedom. Even for philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, "freedom is everything except an 'Idea.' "6 Freedom is neither a philosophical absolute nor a tangible entity but a relational and contextual practice that takes shape in opposition to whatever is locally and ideologically conceived as unfreedom. Thus in slaveholding and male dominant fifth-century Athenian "democracy," Arendt argues, freedom was conceived as escape from an order of "necessity" inhabited by women and by slaves; what was called Athenian freedom thus entailed a metaphysics of domination and a necessary practice of imperialism. Liberal freedom, fitted to an economic order in which property and personhood for some entails poverty and deracination for others, is conveyed by rights against arbitrary state power on one side and against anarchic civil society or property theft on the other. As freedom from encroachment by others and from collective institutions, it entails an atomistic ontology. a metaphysics of separation, an ethos of defensiveness, and an abstract equality. Rendering either the ancient or liberal formations of freedom as "concepts" abstracts them from the historical practices in which they arc rooted, the institutions against which they are oriented, the domination they arc designed to contest, the privileges they are designed to protect. Treating them as concepts not only prevents appreciation of their local and historical character but preempts perception of what is denied and suppressed by them, of what kinds of domination are enacted by particular practices of freedom. It would also appear that the effort to develop a new "postindividualist" concept of freedom responds less to the antidemocratic forces of our time than to a ghostly philosophical standoff between historically abstracted formulations of Marxism and liberalism. In other words, this effort seeks to resolve a problem in (a certain) history of ideas rather than a problem in history. Like a bat flying around the owl of Minerva at dusk, it would attempt to formulate a philosophy of freedom on the grave of selected philosophical traditions rather than to consider freedom in existing configurations of power-economic, social, psychological, political. This is not to say that the contemporary disorientation about freedom is without theoretical dimensions nor is it to suggest that freedom's philosophical crisis, about which more shortly, is merely consequent to a historical or "material" one. I want only to register the extent to which the problematic of political freedom as it relates to democratizing power, while of profound philosophical interest, cannot be resolved at a purely philosophical level if it is to be responsive to the particular social forces and institutions-the sites and sources of domination-of a particular age. But this opens rather than settles the problem of how to formulate a dis- course of freedom appropriate to contesting contemporary antidemocratic configurations of power. One of the ironies of what Nietzsche boldly termed the "instinct for freedom" lies in its inceptive self-cancellation, its crossing of itself in its very first impulse. Initial figurations of freedom are inevitably reactionary in the sense of emerging in reaction to perceived injuries or constraints of a regime from within its own terms. Ideals of freedom ordinarily emerge to vanquish their imagined immediate enemies, but in this move they frequently recycle and reinstate rather than transform the terms of domination that generated them. Consider exploited workers who dream of a world in which work has been abolished, blacks who imagine a world without whites, feminists who conjure a world either without men or without sex, or teenagers who fantasize a world without parents. Such images of freedom perform mirror reversals of suffering without transforming the organization of the activity through which the suffering is produced and without addressing the subject constitution that domination efforts, that is, the constitution of the social categories, "workers," "blacks," "women," or "teenagers." It would thus appear that it Is freedom's relationship to identity-its promise to address a social injury or marking that is itself constitutive of identity-that yields the paradox in which the first imaginings of freedom are always constrained by and potentially even require the very structure of oppression that freedom emerges to oppose. This, I think, is not only a patently Foucaultian point but is contained as well in Marx's argument that "political emancipation" within liberalism conceived for- mal political indifference to civil particularity as liberation because political privilege according to civil particularity appeared as the immediate nature of the domination perpetrated by feudal and Christian monarchy. "True human emancipation" was Marx's formula for escaping the innately contextual and historically specific, hence limited, forms of free- dom. True human emancipation, achieved at the end of history, conjured for Marx not simply liberation from particular constraints but freedom that was both thoroughgoing and permanent, freedom that was neither partial nor evasive but temporally and spatially absolute. However, since true human emancipation eventually acquired for Marx a negative referem (capitalism) and positive content (abolition of capitalism), in time it too would reveal its profoundly historicized and thus limited character.

Brown 95 (Wendy Brown PhD Political Philosophy, professor of political science Berkeley “States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity” pp. 5-8)

"concepts" of freedom, posited independently of specific analyses of contemporary modalities of domination, revisit us with the most troubling kind of idealism insofar as they deflect from the local, historical, and contextual character of freedom Freedom is neither a philosophical absolute nor a tangible entity but a relational and contextual practice that takes shape in opposition to whatever is locally and ideologically conceived as unfreedom. freedom was conceived as escape from an order of "necessity" inhabited by women and by slaves freedom thus entailed a metaphysics of domination and a necessary practice of imperialism freedom is conveyed by rights against arbitrary state power on one side and against anarchic civil society or property theft on the other. it entails a metaphysics of separation, an ethos of defensiveness, and an abstract equality Rendering formations of freedom as "concepts" abstracts them from the historical practices in which they arc rooted, t Treating them as concepts not only prevents appreciation of their local and historical character but preempts perception of what is denied and suppressed by them, of what kinds of domination are enacted by particular practices of freedom. it would attempt to formulate a philosophy of freedom on the grave of selected philosophical traditions rather than to consider freedom in existing configurations of power-economic, social, psychological, political One of the ironies of the "instinct for freedom" lies in its inceptive self-cancellation, its crossing of itself in its very first impulse. Initial figurations of freedom are inevitably reactionary in the sense of emerging in reaction to perceived injuries or constraints of a regime from within its own terms. Ideals of freedom emerge to vanquish imagined immediate enemies but they recycle and reinstate rather than transform the terms of domination that generated them Consider exploited workers who dream of a world in which work has been abolished, blacks who imagine a world without whites, Such images of freedom perform mirror reversals of suffering without transforming the organization of the activity through which the suffering is produced and without addressing the constitution of the social categories it Is freedom's relationship to identity that yields the paradox in which the first imaginings of freedom are always constrained by and potentially even require the very structure of oppression that freedom emerges to oppose

Their conceptions of freedom fail to grasp the modalities of domination, reinforcing the structures that create unfreedom in the first place.

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

For some, fueled by opprobrium toward regulatory norms or other modalities of domination, the language of "resistance" has taken up the ground vacated by a more expansive practice of freedom. For others, it is the discourse of" empowerment" that carries the ghost of freedom's val- ence. Yet as many have noted, insofar as resistance is an effect of the regime it opposes on the one hand, and insofar as its practitioners often seek to void it of normativity to differentiate it from the (regulatory) nature of what it opposes on the other, it is at best politically rebellious; at worst, politically amorphous. Resistance stands against, not for; it is reaction to domination, rarely willing to admit to a desire for it, and it is neutral with regard to possible political direction. Resistance is in no way constrained to a radical or emancipatory aim, a fact that emerges clearly as soon as one analogizes Foucault's notion of resistance to its companion terms in freud or Nietzsche. Yet in some ways this point is less a critique of Foucault, who especially in his later years made clear that his political commitments were not identical with his theoretical ones (and unapologetically revised the latter), than a sign of his misappropriation. For Foucault, resistance marks the presence of power and expands our under' standing of its mechanics, but it is in this regard an analytical strategy rather than an expressly political one. "Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority to power .... [T]he strictly relational character of power relationships . . depends upon a multiplicity of points of resistance: these play the role of adversary, target, support, or handle in power relations." This appreciation of the extent to which resistance is by no means inherently subversive of power also reminds us that it is only by recourse to a very non-foucaultian moral evaluation of power as bad or that which is to be overcome that it is possible to equate resistance with that which is good, progressive, or an end to domination. If popular and academic notions of resistance attach, however weakly at times, to a tradition of protest, the other contemporary substitute tor a discourse of freedom-"empowerment"-would seem to correspond more closely to a tradition of idealist reconciliation. The language of resistance implicitly acknowledges the extent to which protest always transpires inside the regime; "empowerment," in contrast, registers the possibility of generating one's capacities, one's "self-esteem," one's life course, without capitulating to constraints by particular regimes of power. But in so doing, contemporary discourses of empowerment too often signal an oddly adaptive and harmonious relationship with domination insofar as they locate an individual's sense of worth and capacity in the register of individual feeling, a register implicitly located on something of an otherworldly plane vis-a-vis social and political power. In this regard. despite its apparent locution of resistance to subjection, contemporary discourses of empowerment partake strongly of liberal solipsism-- the radical decontextualization of the subject characteristic of liberal discourse that is key to the fictional sovereign individualism of liberalism. Moreover, in its almost exclusive focus on subjects’ emotional bearing and self-regard, empowerment is a formulation that converges with a regime's own legitimacy needs in masking the power of the regime. This is not to suggest that talk of empowerment is always only illusion or delusion. It is to argue, rather, that while the notion of empowerment articulates that feature of freedom concerned with action, with being more than the consumer subject figured in discourses of rights and economic democracy, contemporary deployments of that notion also draw so heavily on an underconstructcd subjectivity that they risk establishing a wide chasm between the (experience of) empowerment and an actual capacity to shape the terms of political, social, or economic life. Indeed, the possibility that one can "feel empowered" without being so forms an Important element of legitimacy for the antidemocratic dimensions of liberalism.

Brown 1995 [Wendy, Professor of Political Science at Berkeley, States of Injury, pp. 20-22]

For some the language of "resistance" has taken up the ground vacated by a more expansive practice of freedom For others, it is the discourse of" empowerment" that carries the ghost of freedom's val- ence Yet resistance is an effect of the regime it opposes resistance marks the presence of power and expands our under' standing of its mechanics, but it is in this regard an analytical strategy rather than an expressly political one This appreciation of the extent to which resistance is by no means inherently subversive of power also reminds us that it is only by recourse to a very non-foucaultian moral evaluation of power as bad or that which is to be overcome that it is possible to equate resistance with that which is good, progressive, or an end to domination. If popular and academic notions of resistance attach, however weakly at times, to a tradition of protest, the other contemporary substitute tor a discourse of freedom-"empowerment"-would seem to correspond more closely to a tradition of idealist reconciliation The language of resistance implicitly acknowledges the extent to which protest always transpires inside the regime; "empowerment," in contrast, registers the possibility of generating one's capacities, one's "self-esteem," one's life course, without capitulating to constraints by particular regimes of power. But in so doing, contemporary discourses of empowerment too often signal an oddly adaptive and harmonious relationship with domination insofar as they locate an individual's sense of worth and capacity in the register of individual feeling, a register implicitly located on something of an otherworldly plane vis-a-vis social and political power. In this regard. despite its apparent locution of resistance to subjection, contemporary discourses of empowerment partake strongly of liberal solipsism-- the radical decontextualization of the subject characteristic of liberal discourse that is key to the fictional sovereign individualism of liberalism Moreover, in its almost exclusive focus on subjects’ emotional bearing and self-regard, empowerment is a formulation that converges with a regime's own legitimacy needs in masking the power of the regime while the notion of empowerment articulates that feature of freedom concerned with action contemporary deployments of that notion also draw so heavily on an underconstructcd subjectivity that they risk establishing a wide chasm between the (experience of) empowerment and an actual capacity to shape the terms of political, social, or economic life. Indeed, the possibility that one can "feel empowered" without being so forms an Important element of legitimacy for the antidemocratic dimensions of liberalism

Contemporary notions of resistance and empowerment rely on the very regulatory norms it seeks to oppose: the freedom for which resistance fights is formulated in the very same terms of liberal sovereignty that produce oppressed subjects in the first place.

Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5

Gonzaga (GDI)

Kritiks

2013

Diplomatically, positive engagement with Venezuela would be a major step toward building American credibility in the world at large, especially in Latin America. Chávez (along with his friends the Castros in Cuba) was able to bolster regional support for his regime by pointing out the United States’ attempts to forcibly intervene in Venezuelan politics. Soon, a number of populist governments in Latin America had rallied around Chávez and his anti-American policies. In 2004, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and three Caribbean nations joined with Venezuela and Cuba to form the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America, an organization in direct opposition to the Free Trade Area in the Americas proposed (but never realized) by the Bush administration. Chávez galvanized these nations—many of whom have experienced American interventionist tactics—by vilifying America as a common, imperial enemy. Unfortunately for the United States, its general strategy regarding Venezuela has often strengthened Chávez’s position. Every time Washington chastises Venezuela for opposing American interests or attempts to bring sanctions against the Latin American country, the leader in Caracas (whether it be Chávez or Maduro) simply gains more evidence toward his claim that Washington is a neo-colonialist meddler. This weakens the United States’ diplomatic position, while simultaneously strengthening Venezuela’s. If Washington wants Latin America to stop its current trend of electing leftist, Chavista governments, its first step should be to adopt a less astringent tone in dealing with Venezuela. Caracas will be unable to paint Washington as an aggressor, and Washington will in turn gain a better image in Latin America.¶ Beyond leading to more amicable, cooperative relationships with Latin American nations, engagement with Venezuela would also be economically advisable. With the world’s largest oil reserves, countless other valuable resources, and stunning natural beauty to attract scores of tourists, Venezuela has quite a bit to offer economically. Even now, America can see the possible benefits of economic engagement with Caracas by looking at one of the few extant cases of such cooperation: Each year, thousands of needy Americans are able to keep their homes heated because of the cooperation between Venezuela and a Boston-area oil company.¶ Engagement with Venezuela would also lead to stronger economic cooperation with the entirety of Latin America. It was mostly through Venezuela’s efforts that the United States was unable to create a “Free Trade Area of the Americas,” an endeavor that would have eliminated most trade barriers among participant nations, thereby leading to more lucrative trade. In a world where the United States and Venezuela were to enjoy normalized relations, all nations involved would benefit from such agreements.¶ For both diplomatic and economic reasons, then, positive engagement is the best course of action for the United States. As it stands, the negative relationship between the countries has created an atmosphere of animosity in the hemisphere, hindering dialogue and making economic cooperation nearly impossible. While there is much for which the Venezuelan government can rightly be criticized—authoritarian rule, abuse of human rights, lack of market-friendly policies—nothing that the United States is doing to counter those drawbacks is having any effect. The United States should stop playing “tough guy” with Venezuela, bite the bullet, and work toward stability and prosperity for the entire hemisphere. We aren’t catching any flies with our vinegar—it’s high time we started trying to catch them with honey.

Griffin 4/3 [John, freshman analyst for the Harvard Crimson--http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/4/3/Harvard-Venezuela-Chavez-death/ -2013-SR]

Diplomatically engagement with Venezuela would be a major step toward building American credibility in the world at large, especially in Latin America Chávez ) was able to bolster regional support for his regime by pointing out the United States’ attempts to forcibly intervene in Venezuelan politics a number of populist governments in Latin America had rallied around Chávez and his anti-American policies Chávez galvanized these nations by vilifying America as a common, imperial enemy. the United States general strategy regarding Venezuela has often strengthened Chávez’s position This weakens the United States’ diplomatic position, . If Washington wants Latin America to stop its current trend of electing leftist its first step should be to adopt a less astringent tone in dealing with Venezuela cooperative relationships with Latin American nations, engagement with Venezuela would also be economically advisable America can see the possible benefits of economic engagement with Caracas by looking at one of the few extant cases of such cooperation Engagement with Venezuela would also lead to stronger economic cooperation with the entirety of Latin America In a world where the United States and Venezuela were to enjoy normalized relations, all nations involved would benefit from such agreements. As it stands, the negative relationship between the countries has created an atmosphere of animosity in the hemisphere, hindering dialogue and making economic cooperation nearly impossible The United States should stop playing “tough guy” with Venezuela , and work toward stability and prosperity for the entire hemisphere.

The United States federal government should substantially increase its debt relief efforts toward Venezuela.

Venezuela Debt Relief Affirmative - DDI 2013 SS.html5

Dartmouth DDI

Affirmatives

2013

(Reuters) - Venezuela's recent designation of an acting head of its diplomatic mission in the United States shows the OPEC nation's desire to restore full diplomatic relations, the foreign minister said in an interview broadcast on Sunday.¶ Disputes between Caracas and Washington were common during the 14-year-rule of late socialist leader Hugo Chavez, leaving both nations without ambassadors in each other's capitals.¶ Foreign Minister Elias Jaua suggested in a televised interview that the move to name government ally Calixto Ortega as charge d'affaires in Washington could be a prelude to restoring ambassadors.¶ "This is a message for U.S. politicians so they understand Venezuela's desire to normalize relations ... via the designation of the highest diplomatic authorities," he said. "Why? Because the United States remains our top trade partner."¶ Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has in recent months said he wants better ties with Washington as long as the relationship is respectful.

Reuters 5/19 [http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/20/us-venezuela-usa-idUSBRE94J01R20130520 –2013—SR]

- Venezuela's recent designation of an acting head of its diplomatic mission in the United States shows the OPEC nation's desire to restore full diplomatic relations Disputes between Caracas and Washington were common during the 14-year-rule of late socialist leader Hugo Chavez "This is a message for U.S. politicians so they understand Venezuela's desire to normalize relations ... via the designation of the highest diplomatic authorities," the United States remains our top trade partner." President Maduro has in recent months said he wants better ties with Washington

B. Now is the critical time to resolve diplomatic relations-Maduro’s remarks

Venezuela Debt Relief Affirmative - DDI 2013 SS.html5

Dartmouth DDI

Affirmatives

2013

The Economist Intelligence Unit reports that “Venezuela is currently struggling with a lack of foreign exchange, which has put significant pressure on the overvalued official exchange rate of BsF6.3 to US$1”. Additionally, inflation is in the high 30s, (while the Latin American average is 7 per cent ), the national debt is rising, and the fiscal deficit is growing; it is said to have tripled to 11 per cent of gross national product. There is also growing concern within Venezuela about money being spent on, or given-away to, foreign countries while sections of the Venezuelan population are facing hardships – a justifiable concern and one that Maduro cannot ignore.¶ All this puts Maduro in a very difficult position, worsened by the fact that a now rampant opposition is whipping up as much popular resentment of him as it can.

Sanders 7/14 [Sir Ronald—senior reporter for the Barbados Advocate- http://www.barbadosadvocate.com/newsitem.asp?more=columnists&NewsID=31512 -SR]

“Venezuela is currently struggling with a lack of foreign exchange, which has put significant pressure on the overvalued official exchange rate debt is rising, and the fiscal deficit is growing; it is said to have tripled to 11 per cent of gross national product. There is also growing concern within Venezuela about money being spent on, or given-away to, foreign countries while sections of the Venezuelan population are facing hardships a justifiable concern and one that Maduro cannot ignore

Venezuelan debt is the critical issue-foreign exchange is key

Venezuela Debt Relief Affirmative - DDI 2013 SS.html5

Dartmouth DDI

Affirmatives

2013

But I particularly wanted to make the point to this audience and to circulate to a wider audience certain points about climate change this morning, which is perhaps the 21st century's biggest foreign- policy challenge, along with preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. I believe those two threats over the longer term are the biggest threats to the peace and security of the world.¶ A world that is failing to respond to climate change is one in which the values embodied in the United Nations will not be met, and it's a world in which competition and conflict would win out over collaboration.¶ We're at a very crucial point in the global debate on this subject. Many people are questioning, in the wake of Copenhagen, whether we should continue to seek a response to climate change through the U.N. and whether we can ever hope to deal with this enormous challenge.¶ And I will first argue today that an effective response to climate change underpins our security and prosperity; second, that our response should be to strive for a binding global deal, whatever the setbacks; and third, I will set out why effective deployment of foreign policy assets is crucial to mobilizing the political will needed if we're going to shape an effective response.¶ Now, Ban Ki-moon is right to have made climate change his top priority. Two weeks ago, I was talking about Britain's values in a networked world. I said then that a successful response to climate change must be a central objective of British foreign policy. And I said this not only because I believe action against climate change is in line with a values-based foreign policy, but because it underpins our prosperity and security.¶ You can't have food, water or energy security without climate security; they are interconnected and inseparable. They form four resource pillars on which global security, prosperity and equity stand. Each depends on the other. Plentiful, affordable food requires reliable and affordable access to water and energy. Increasing dependence on coal, oil and gas threatens climate security, increasing the severity of floods and droughts, damaging food production, exacerbating the loss of biodiversity, and in countries that rely on hydropower, undermining energy security through the impact on the availability of water.¶ As the world becomes more networked, the impact of climate change in one country or region will affect the prosperity and security of others around the world.¶ No one can have failed to be appalled by the devastating floods in Pakistan. They overwhelmed the capacity of government to respond and opened political space for extremists. While Pakistan has borne the brunt of the human impact, China too has been hit on a vast scale by a seemingly endless sequence of droughts, floods and deadly mudslides. The Russian drought last month damaged the wheat harvest, leading to an export ban. World prices surged, hitting the poorest hardest, and sparking riots over bread prices in far away Mozambique.¶ While no one weather event can ever be linked with certainty to climate change, the broad patterns of abnormality seen this year are consistent with climate-change models. They provide an illustration of the events we will be encountering increasingly in the future.¶ So the clock is ticking, and the time to act is now. We must all take responsibility for this threat and take robust action. But we must also be clear-headed about the difficulties of reaching agreement and not lose heart when the going gets tough.¶ The post-war leaders set up the United Nations in the aftermath of conflagration. They saw the pressing need for global solutions to global problems: cooperation not conflict, through frameworks and institutions embedded in the rule of law, and an international system that is fair and offers everyone a realistic prospect of security and prosperity.¶ Failure to respond to climate change is inimical to all these values, undermining trust between nations, intensifying competition for resources, and shrinking the political space available for cooperation. It is an affront to fairness, since it puts the greatest burden on those who have done least to cause the problem and are least able to deal with its consequences.¶ It is incompatible with the values and aspirations that the U.N. embodies. And it's incompatible with the values and aspirations of British foreign policy.¶ For more than 20 years, we've been striving to build an effective international response to climate change. But we have lacked the collective ambition required. We need to shift investment urgently from high-carbon "business as usual" to the low-carbon economy. This means building an essentially decarbonized global economy by mid- century.¶ At the same time, we must ensure development is climate resilient; otherwise, the changes in climate that are already unavoidable will block the path for hundreds of millions of people from poverty to prosperity. These changes also threaten to sweep away the investments in development we have made, and just as the bridges and schools in Pakistan were swept away.¶ To drive that shift in investment from low to high carbon, we need a global climate change deal under the United Nations.¶ Now, some have argued that we should abandon hope of doing so. They say Copenhagen proved it's all too difficult; we should focus instead on less inclusive and less demanding responses, such as coalitions of the willing. But we believe this would be a strategic error. It mistakes the nature of the task, which is to expand the realm of the possible, not to lower our ambition by accepting its current limits.¶ And we must recognize this at Cancun. One thing Copenhagen did give us was a set of political commitments, captured in the Copenhagen Accord, on which we can build. More than 120 countries have now associated themselves with that accord, and that represents a broad and growing consensus. We now need to ensure that we live up to the commitments we made to each other in the accord, and reach out even more widely.¶ Copenhagen, despite those accords, was a strategic setback, but it was not by any means the end of the road. We need to be clear why it failed to live up to high expectations and why it did not deliver a legally binding deal.¶ Many people say that it failed because of process: The diplomats and the politicians had created a negotiation that was too difficult and too complex. But this misses the point. International treaties are an outcome, not an input, of political bargains. If you've made the political commitment to deliver, you can make the process work to deliver.¶ The real reason Copenhagen did not deliver on high expectations was a lack of political will. Many in developing countries saw a gap between the words and the deeds of the industrialized economies. They questioned whether we really believed our own rhetoric. And to answer those questions, we each need to start at home.¶ That is why the coalition government to which I belong has committed itself to being the greenest government ever in the United Kingdom, and why, with others in Europe, we are calling on the European Union to commit to a 30-percent cut in emissions by 2020 without waiting for the rest of the world to act.¶ The UK is already the world leader in offshore wind, with more projects installed, in planning and in construction than any other country in the world. We're undertaking the most radical transformation of our electricity sector ever. We aim to provide over 30 percent of our domestic electricity from renewables by 2020. We have committed to build no new coal-fired power stations without carbon capture and storage technology, and we've announced our intention to continue the demonstration projects of that.¶ And because it's imperative that foreign and domestic policies are mutually reinforcing, we must ensure that our approach is coherent. Now, that's one reason we have established the new British National Security Council: to ensure this happens across the full range of issues, including climate change.¶ And that's why I work hand in glove with Chris Huhne, the British Energy and Climate Change secretary, and Andrew Mitchell, the International Development secretary, to ensure that our domestic action reflects our level of international ambition.¶ But we won't succeed, of course, if we act alone. We must aim for a framework that is global and binding. It needs to be global because climate change affects everyone. Only a response that allows everyone a voice will generate a sense of common purpose and legitimacy. Only a response that is binding will convince investors that we intend to keep the promises we make to each other. Businesses need clear political signals, so let's show them an unequivocal green light.¶ We are now a few weeks away from the 16th Conference of Parties on Climate Change in Cancun. And I commend the consultative and collaborative approach Mexico has taken ahead of this meeting. Thanks to their determination and foresight, we have a chance in Cancun to regain momentum and make progress on key issues such as forests, technology, finance and transparency of commitments. Cancun will -- may not get us all the way to a full agreement, but it can put us back on track to one.¶ That said, the negotiations can't succeed inside a bubble. The negotiators in the U.N. process can't themselves build political will. They have to operate on the basis of current political realities in the countries they represent. And it's those realities that limit the ambition that we can set in the -- in such negotiations, and it's those realities that we now need to shift.¶ There is no global consensus on what climate change puts at risk, geopolitically and for the global economy, and thus on the scale and urgency of the response we need. We must build a global consensus if we are to guarantee our citizens security and prosperity. That is a job for foreign policy.¶ A fundamental purpose here for foreign policy is to shift the political debate, to create the political space for leaders and negotiators to reach agreement. We didn't get that right before Copenhagen, and we must get it right now.¶ So we urgently need to mobilize foreign ministers and the diplomats they lead, as well as institutions such as the Council on Foreign Relations, to put climate change at the heart of foreign- policy thinking.¶ When I became foreign secretary in May, I said the core goals of our foreign policy were to guarantee Britain's security and prosperity. Robust global action on climate change is essential to that agenda. That is why the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, under my leadership, is a vocal advocate for climate diplomacy. All British ambassadors carry the argument for a global low-carbon transition in their breast pocket or in their handbag. Climate change is part of their daily vocabulary, alongside the traditional themes of foreign policy. And they're supported by our unique network of climate attaches throughout the world.¶ The core assets of foreign policy are its networks and its convening power. Foreign policy can build political impulses to overcome barriers between sectors and cultures. In a networked world, diplomacy builds partnerships beyond government. And nowhere are those partnerships more vital than on climate.¶ So we must mobilize all our networks, not just across government but between governments, using organizations such as the Commonwealth as well. We must reach out, beyond, to NGOs, faith groups and businesses. And of all these, perhaps business engagement is the key to making a difference. It's business that will lead low-carbon transition. It's business that best understands the incentives needed to help us all prosper.¶ We must also harness scientific expertise in cutting-edge low- carbon technologies. The scientific community will develop the goods which will power the low-carbon economy and drive global ambition on climate change. And that's why the British government has a science and innovation network, which fosters collaborative research in the U.K. and other countries.¶ Now, what can the U.K. and the European Union do to make that fundamental shift and shape a global consensus on climate change? The most serious problem at Copenhagen, and the strongest brake on political will, was and is a lack of confidence in the low-carbon economy. Too few people in too few countries are yet convinced that a rapid move to low carbon is compatible with economic recovery and growth. They see the short-term economic and domestic stability risks before the opportunities and the longer-term risks of inaction.¶ There should be only one European response to that confidence gap. The EU, in my view, must accelerate its own progress and demonstrate that a low-carbon growth path makes us more competitive. I am convinced this is in the long-term interests of Europe's economy. We have learned painful lessons from the oil price shocks. We must modernize our infrastructure. The opportunities are out there. The global industry in low-carbon and environmental goods and services is already estimated to be worth up to 3.2 trillion pounds a year. Nearly a million British people are now employed in this sector, and that's why we are creating a green investment bank to ensure that we can properly support and develop low-carbon industry.¶ But we need to redouble our efforts, both in the EU (itself ?) and in our engagement with partners. Each of us as member states will be better able to accelerate if we're doing so together as the world's largest single market. And by opening up this effort through partnership with others, we can make it easier for them to accelerate, too.¶ So we'll be at the forefront of pushing for low-carbon modernization of Europe's infrastructure and energy policy. The European Union's budget until 2013 is set out in the current "financial perspective".¶ We will argue -- we will need to agree the financial perspective for the seven years after that, the period including our 2020 climate goals. And it's -- as ever, it's right that the EU budget should reflect the prevailing economic circumstances. It's also right that we direct the budget to today's challenges, not those of yesterday. And that means one that supports the transition to a low-carbon economy.¶ Action in Europe alone will not be enough. We need both the developed and developing world to take action. And this week Guido Westerwelle, the German foreign minister, and I have tasked our teams to come together to shape a coordinated, diplomacy-led effort on climate change, combining the strengths of our respective foreign services.¶ I've just put the case for bringing a new urgency for low-carbon transition within the EU. But together we should carry that urgency in external dialogues, whether they are with the United States, China or India.¶ The transition to low carbon will happen faster and maximize the benefit for all if the United States -- historically the world's largest emitter -- is at the leading edge. I recognize the political challenges that the U.S. administration faces and welcome President Obama's commitment to combat climate change. As he said in his State of the Union speech, "the nation that leads the clean-energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy."¶ Whatever the outcome of the upcoming midterm elections in the U.S., there is scope for political unity around an economic agenda that targets new energy opportunities and new jobs. American business understands this new market and should want to lead it. But to make these new clean-energy investments at the required pace and on a sufficient scale, they need the right incentives.¶ On climate, as in so many areas, the world looks to the US for leadership, because it has the economic clout and diplomatic leverage to shift the global debate.¶ And I look forward to working with the U.S. administration and indeed with the Council on Foreign Relations to raise global ambitions and put us back on the path to sustainable growth.¶ A key challenge for Europe is to build an economic partnership with China that reinforces the steps China is taking towards a low- carbon economy. These steps include its recent announcement of the five provinces and eight cities that have been designated as China's low-carbon pilots. Together these pilots cover 350 million people, so an ambitious approach to these schemes, tenaciously implemented, could provide a critical boost to global confidence in the concept of low- carbon development and help put China on the path to sustainable prosperity.¶ It could also produce huge two-way investment and partnership opportunities. Europe should place itself at the heart of these, working with China to maximize the ambition and the opportunities and to build the shared technology standards that will shape a global low- carbon market.¶ In China's case, low-carbon opportunity is matched by urgent low- carbon need. The pace of growth in China means average Chinese per- capita emissions could soon eclipse those of Europe. So while China has taken some very welcome steps, without a commitment from China to further decisive action, the efforts of others will be in vain.¶ The emerging economies face a dilemma. Often they are the most vulnerable to the direct effects of climate change. But they are concerned that action against climate change will adversely affect their development. The challenge to all countries is to have a high- growth, low-carbon economy. Some, like Brazil, which derives nearly half its energy from clean and renewable resources, are rising to that challenge.¶ India is another, embodying in microcosm the challenge that climate change poses to us all. Threatened by food, water and energy insecurity, India has responded with ambitious plans to generate 20 gigawatts of solar power by 2022.¶ South Africa, a coal-dependent economy, the success of which is so important to growth and prosperity within the continent, has made a significant offer to deviate their emissions from the business-as- usual pathway.¶ The opportunity is for the emerging economies -- for the emerging economies is to make a direct leap to low carbon, avoiding the high- carbon lock-in that we see in the developed world: a new, sustainable pathway for prosperity and security. A global low-carbon economy is not an idealist's pipe dream but a 21st-century realist's imperative. Countries that adapt quickly to a carbon-constrained world will be better able to deliver lasting prosperity for their citizens. As a Permanent Security Council member, I'm determined that the U.K. will play its full part in that, not least by supporting climate finance for the poorest.¶ Collectively, we share a responsibility to those most vulnerable to the impact of climate change. Bangladesh, with its densely populated coastal region, is particularly susceptible to rising sea levels. Glacial melt, sea-level rises and El Nino-type events threaten the lives of millions across South America. And the very existence of many small island states is under threat.¶ We have a shared vision to meet the Millennium Development Goals. But in a world without action on climate change, that vision will remain a dream, and the efforts of the last 10 years would¶ So climate change is one of the gravest threats to our security and prosperity. Unless we take robust and timely action to deal with it, no country will be immune to its effects. However difficult it might seem now, a global deal under the U.N. is the only response to this threat which will create the necessary confidence to drive a low- carbon transition.¶ We must be undaunted by the scale of the challenge.¶ We must continue to strive for agreement. We must not accept that because there is no consensus on a way forward now, that there never will be one. And to change the debate, we must imaginatively deploy all of the foreign policy assets in our armory until we've shaped that global consensus.¶ A successful response to climate change will not only stabilize the climate, but open the way to a future in which we can meet our needs through cooperation, in accordance with the ideals of the United Nations. Failure to do so will enhance competitive tendencies and make the world more dangerous, so this is not actually a hard choice.¶ We have to get this right. If we do, we can still shape our world. And if we don't, the world will determine our destiny for us.

Hague 2k10 [William Hague, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and Member of Parliament for Richmond, United Kingdom, “The Diplomacy of Climate Change,” 9/27/10]

climate change is the 21st century's biggest foreign- policy challenge, along with preventing the spread of nuclear weapons those two threats over the longer term are the biggest threats to the peace and security of the world We're at a very crucial point in the global debate on this subject Many people are questioning whether we should continue to seek a response to climate change through the U.N. and whether we can ever hope to deal with this enormous challenge an effective response to climate change underpins our security and prosperity; our response should be to strive for a binding global deal, whatever the setbacks; effective deployment of foreign policy assets is crucial to mobilizing the political will needed if we're going to shape an effective response a successful response to climate change must be a central objective this not only because I believe action against climate change is in line with a values-based foreign policy, but because it underpins our prosperity and security. You can't have food, water or energy security without climate security; . Plentiful, affordable food requires reliable and affordable access to water and energy Increasing dependence on coal, oil and gas threatens climate security, increasing the severity of floods and droughts, damaging food production, exacerbating the loss of biodiversity, and in countries that rely on hydropower, undermining energy security through the impact on the availability of water climate change will affect the prosperity and security of others around the world the pressing need for global solutions to global problems: cooperation not conflict, through frameworks and institutions embedded in the rule of law, and an international system that is fair and offers everyone a realistic prospect of security and prosperity. we've been striving to build an effective international response to climate change. But we have lacked the collective ambition required. These changes also threaten to sweep away the investments in development we have made, we believe this would be a strategic error. The real reason Copenhagen did not deliver on high expectations was a lack of political will we won't succeed, of course, if we act alone. We must aim for a framework that is global and binding. It needs to be global because climate change affects everyone Mexico has taken ahead of this meeting. Thanks to their determination and foresight, we have a chance in Cancun to regain momentum and make progress on key issues such as forests, technology, finance and transparency of commitments. There is no global consensus on what climate change puts at risk, geopolitically and for the global economy, and thus on the scale and urgency of the response we need. diplomacy builds partnerships beyond government. And nowhere are those partnerships more vital than on climate . Each of us as member states will be better able to accelerate if we're doing so together as the world's largest single market. coordinated, diplomacy-led effort on climate change, combining the strengths of our respective foreign services in a world without action on climate change, that vision will remain a dream, and the efforts of the last 10 years would climate change is one of the gravest threats to our security and prosperity. Unless we take robust and timely action to deal with it, no country will be immune to its effects. A successful response to climate change will not only stabilize the climate, but open the way to a future in which we can meet our needs through cooperation . We have to get this right. If we do, we can still shape our world. And if we don't, the world will determine our destiny for us.

US Diplomacy solves warming, water scarcity, and proliferation

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While the U.S. State Department isn't holding its collective breath, it would like to see better relations between the two countries in the post-Chavez era. That would enable the United States to leverage Venezuela against Iran as it continues attempts to prevent Iran from achieving nuclear weapons.¶ Venezuela and Iran became allies during the Chavez' tenure, and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited Venezuela in 2012. The two countries signed various trade and financial agreements.¶ The U.S. has deployed an array of sanctions against Iran. Venezuela's help could help strangle resources that support Iran's nuclear program. According the the State Department, the United States sanctioned Venezuela in 2011 for "delivering at least three cargoes of reformate, a blending component for gasoline, to Iran between December 2010 and March 2011."

Jones, 13 – (Steve Jones, US Foreign Policy on About News. “Does Chavez' Death Mean Better Relations Between U.S. and Venezuela?” http://usforeignpolicy.about.com/od/alliesenemies/a/Does-Chavez-Death-Mean-Better-Relations-Between-U-s-And-Venezuela.htm)//SDL

the U.S. State Department would like to see better relations between the two post-Chavez That would enable the U S to leverage Venezuela against Iran as it continues attempts to prevent Iran from achieving nuclear weapons Venezuela and Iran became allies during the Chavez' tenure The U.S. has deployed an array of sanctions against Iran. Venezuela's help could help strangle resources that support Iran's nuclear program the U S sanctioned Venezuela in 2011 for "delivering at least three cargoes of reformate, a blending component for gasoline, to Iran

Post-Chavez US-Venezuela ties vital to prevent Iran proliferation

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Meanwhile, Iran is testing the line in the Middle East. On its current trajectory, the Islamic Republic will become a nuclear weapons state before the end of the decade. According to the leadership in Tehran, Iran is exercising its “inalienable right” to build Iranian enrichment plants and make fuel for its peaceful civilian nuclear power generators. These same facilities, however, can continue enriching uranium to 90 percent U-235, which is the ideal core of a nuclear bomb. No one in the international community doubts that Iran’s hidden objective in building enrichment facilities is to build nuclear bombs. If Iran crosses its nuclear finish line, a Middle Eastern cascade of new nuclear weapons states could trigger the first multi-party nuclear arms race, far more volatile than the Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. Given Egypt’s historic role as the leader of the Arab Middle East, the prospects of it living unarmed alongside a nuclear Persia are very low. The IAEA’s reports of clandestine nuclear experiments hint that Cairo may have considered this possibility. Were Saudi Arabia to buy a dozen nuclear warheads that could be mated to the Chinese medium-range ballistic missiles it purchased secretly in the 1980s, few in the US intelligence community would be surprised. Given Saudi Arabia’s role as the major financier of Pakistan’s clandestine nuclear program in the 1980s, it is not out of the question that Riyadh and Islamabad have made secret arrangements for this contingency. Such a multi-party nuclear arms race in the Middle East would be like playing Russian roulette—dramatically increasing the likelihood of a regional nuclear war. Other nightmare scenarios for the region include an accidental or unauthorized nuclear launch from Iran, theft of nuclear warheads from an unstable regime in Tehran, and possible Israeli preemption against Iran’s nuclear facilities, which Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has implied, threatening, “Under no circumstances, and at no point, can Israel allow anyone with these kinds of malicious designs against us to have control of weapons of destruction that can threaten our existence.”

Allison 2k6 --- (Graham Tillett Allison Jr. is an American political scientist and professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, Fall 2006, “The Will to Prevent,” Harvard International Law Review, lexis nexis)

facilities can continue enriching uranium to the ideal core of a nuclear bomb. If Iran crosses its nuclear finish line, a Middle Eastern cascade of new nuclear weapons states could trigger the first multi-party nuclear arms race, far more volatile than the Cold War Egypt’s prospects of living unarmed alongside a nuclear Persia are very low. Cairo may have considered this possibility. Were Saudi Arabia to buy nuclear warheads that could be mated to Chinese missiles few would be surprised it is not out of the question that Riyadh and Islamabad have made arrangements a multi-party nuclear arms race in the Middle East would be dramatically increasing the likelihood of a nuclear war. Other scenarios include an accidental or unauthorized launch from Iran, theft of warheads from Tehran, and possible Israeli preemption

Iran prolif leads to Middle East arms race and ensures nuclear war

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U.S. officials are cautiously optimistic that the death of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez could improve relations between the two countries, but they aren’t holding their breath.¶ “One of the things that happens over 14 years in a government like Venezuela is it really did revolve around one man. So while I’m hesitant to say that the change in an individual, or the passing of an individual, completely changes a relationship,” a State Department official told reporters Wednesday, “he played an outsized role in that government and therefore his absence can have outsized implications.”¶ That said, Venezuela is now facing elections, as mandated by its constitution. “And all of us know electoral campaigns are not times to break new ground on foreign policy,” the official said.¶ (PHOTOS: Rise of Chávez: The Late Venezuelan President’s Path to Power)¶ Not to mention that hours before Chávez’s death was announced, Venezuelan Vice President Nicolás Maduro, Chávez’s anointed successor, accused the U.S. of working to destabilize Venezuela and of causing Chávez’s illness in a rambling 90-minute press conference. Two U.S. State Department officials were expelled from Venezuela following the allegations. Chávez died Tuesday of cancer.

Newton-Smalls 3/7 [Jay, reporter for Time-- http://swampland.time.com/2013/03/07/u-s-hopes-chavezs-passing-could-smooth-relations-with-venezuela/ --2013—SR]

U.S. officials are cautiously optimistic that the death of Chávez could improve relations between the two countries One of the things that happens over 14 years in a government like Venezuela is it really did revolve around one man he played an outsized role in that government and therefore his absence can have outsized implications.

Chavez’s death makes now key

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Diplomatically, positive engagement with Venezuela would be a major step toward building American credibility in the world at large, especially in Latin America. Chávez (along with his friends the Castros in Cuba) was able to bolster regional support for his regime by pointing out the United States’ attempts to forcibly intervene in Venezuelan politics. Soon, a number of populist governments in Latin America had rallied around Chávez and his anti-American policies. In 2004, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and three Caribbean nations joined with Venezuela and Cuba to form the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America, an organization in direct opposition to the Free Trade Area in the Americas proposed (but never realized) by the Bush administration. Chávez galvanized these nations—many of whom have experienced American interventionist tactics—by vilifying America as a common, imperial enemy. Unfortunately for the United States, its general strategy regarding Venezuela has often strengthened Chávez’s position. Every time Washington chastises Venezuela for opposing American interests or attempts to bring sanctions against the Latin American country, the leader in Caracas (whether it be Chávez or Maduro) simply gains more evidence toward his claim that Washington is a neo-colonialist meddler. This weakens the United States’ diplomatic position, while simultaneously strengthening Venezuela’s. If Washington wants Latin America to stop its current trend of electing leftist, Chavista governments, its first step should be to adopt a less astringent tone in dealing with Venezuela. Caracas will be unable to paint Washington as an aggressor, and Washington will in turn gain a better image in Latin America.¶ Beyond leading to more amicable, cooperative relationships with Latin American nations, engagement with Venezuela would also be economically advisable. With the world’s largest oil reserves, countless other valuable resources, and stunning natural beauty to attract scores of tourists, Venezuela has quite a bit to offer economically. Even now, America can see the possible benefits of economic engagement with Caracas by looking at one of the few extant cases of such cooperation: Each year, thousands of needy Americans are able to keep their homes heated because of the cooperation between Venezuela and a Boston-area oil company.¶ Engagement with Venezuela would also lead to stronger economic cooperation with the entirety of Latin America. It was mostly through Venezuela’s efforts that the United States was unable to create a “Free Trade Area of the Americas,” an endeavor that would have eliminated most trade barriers among participant nations, thereby leading to more lucrative trade. In a world where the United States and Venezuela were to enjoy normalized relations, all nations involved would benefit from such agreements.¶ For both diplomatic and economic reasons, then, positive engagement is the best course of action for the United States. As it stands, the negative relationship between the countries has created an atmosphere of animosity in the hemisphere, hindering dialogue and making economic cooperation nearly impossible. While there is much for which the Venezuelan government can rightly be criticized—authoritarian rule, abuse of human rights, lack of market-friendly policies—nothing that the United States is doing to counter those drawbacks is having any effect. The United States should stop playing “tough guy” with Venezuela, bite the bullet, and work toward stability and prosperity for the entire hemisphere. We aren’t catching any flies with our vinegar—it’s high time we started trying to catch them with honey.

Griffin 4/3 [John, freshman analyst for the Harvard Crimson--http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/4/3/Harvard-Venezuela-Chavez-death/ -2013-SR]

Diplomatically engagement with Venezuela would be a major step toward building American credibility in the world at large, especially in Latin America Chávez ) was able to bolster regional support for his regime by pointing out the United States’ attempts to forcibly intervene in Venezuelan politics a number of populist governments in Latin America had rallied around Chávez and his anti-American policies Chávez galvanized these nations by vilifying America as a common, imperial enemy. the United States general strategy regarding Venezuela has often strengthened Chávez’s position This weakens the United States’ diplomatic position . If Washington wants Latin America to stop its current trend of electing leftist its first step should be to adopt a less astringent tone in dealing with Venezuela cooperative relationships with Latin American nations, engagement with Venezuela would also be economically advisable America can see the possible benefits of economic engagement with Caracas by looking at one of the few extant cases of such cooperation Engagement with Venezuela would also lead to stronger economic cooperation with the entirety of Latin America In a world where the United States and Venezuela were to enjoy normalized relations, all nations involved would benefit from such agreements. As it stands, the negative relationship between the countries has created an atmosphere of animosity in the hemisphere, hindering dialogue and making economic cooperation nearly impossible The United States should stop playing “tough guy” with Venezuela , and work toward stability and prosperity for the entire hemisphere.

Economic engagement with Venezuela bolsters US credibility-it spills over

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But I particularly wanted to make the point to this audience and to circulate to a wider audience certain points about climate change this morning, which is perhaps the 21st century's biggest foreign- policy challenge, along with preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. I believe those two threats over the longer term are the biggest threats to the peace and security of the world.¶ A world that is failing to respond to climate change is one in which the values embodied in the United Nations will not be met, and it's a world in which competition and conflict would win out over collaboration.¶ We're at a very crucial point in the global debate on this subject. Many people are questioning, in the wake of Copenhagen, whether we should continue to seek a response to climate change through the U.N. and whether we can ever hope to deal with this enormous challenge.¶ And I will first argue today that an effective response to climate change underpins our security and prosperity; second, that our response should be to strive for a binding global deal, whatever the setbacks; and third, I will set out why effective deployment of foreign policy assets is crucial to mobilizing the political will needed if we're going to shape an effective response.¶ Now, Ban Ki-moon is right to have made climate change his top priority. Two weeks ago, I was talking about Britain's values in a networked world. I said then that a successful response to climate change must be a central objective of British foreign policy. And I said this not only because I believe action against climate change is in line with a values-based foreign policy, but because it underpins our prosperity and security.¶ You can't have food, water or energy security without climate security; they are interconnected and inseparable. They form four resource pillars on which global security, prosperity and equity stand. Each depends on the other. Plentiful, affordable food requires reliable and affordable access to water and energy. Increasing dependence on coal, oil and gas threatens climate security, increasing the severity of floods and droughts, damaging food production, exacerbating the loss of biodiversity, and in countries that rely on hydropower, undermining energy security through the impact on the availability of water.¶ As the world becomes more networked, the impact of climate change in one country or region will affect the prosperity and security of others around the world.¶ No one can have failed to be appalled by the devastating floods in Pakistan. They overwhelmed the capacity of government to respond and opened political space for extremists. While Pakistan has borne the brunt of the human impact, China too has been hit on a vast scale by a seemingly endless sequence of droughts, floods and deadly mudslides. The Russian drought last month damaged the wheat harvest, leading to an export ban. World prices surged, hitting the poorest hardest, and sparking riots over bread prices in far away Mozambique.¶ While no one weather event can ever be linked with certainty to climate change, the broad patterns of abnormality seen this year are consistent with climate-change models. They provide an illustration of the events we will be encountering increasingly in the future.¶ So the clock is ticking, and the time to act is now. We must all take responsibility for this threat and take robust action. But we must also be clear-headed about the difficulties of reaching agreement and not lose heart when the going gets tough.¶ The post-war leaders set up the United Nations in the aftermath of conflagration. They saw the pressing need for global solutions to global problems: cooperation not conflict, through frameworks and institutions embedded in the rule of law, and an international system that is fair and offers everyone a realistic prospect of security and prosperity.¶ Failure to respond to climate change is inimical to all these values, undermining trust between nations, intensifying competition for resources, and shrinking the political space available for cooperation. It is an affront to fairness, since it puts the greatest burden on those who have done least to cause the problem and are least able to deal with its consequences.¶ It is incompatible with the values and aspirations that the U.N. embodies. And it's incompatible with the values and aspirations of British foreign policy.¶ For more than 20 years, we've been striving to build an effective international response to climate change. But we have lacked the collective ambition required. We need to shift investment urgently from high-carbon "business as usual" to the low-carbon economy. This means building an essentially decarbonized global economy by mid- century.¶ At the same time, we must ensure development is climate resilient; otherwise, the changes in climate that are already unavoidable will block the path for hundreds of millions of people from poverty to prosperity. These changes also threaten to sweep away the investments in development we have made, and just as the bridges and schools in Pakistan were swept away.¶ To drive that shift in investment from low to high carbon, we need a global climate change deal under the United Nations.¶ Now, some have argued that we should abandon hope of doing so. They say Copenhagen proved it's all too difficult; we should focus instead on less inclusive and less demanding responses, such as coalitions of the willing. But we believe this would be a strategic error. It mistakes the nature of the task, which is to expand the realm of the possible, not to lower our ambition by accepting its current limits.¶ And we must recognize this at Cancun. One thing Copenhagen did give us was a set of political commitments, captured in the Copenhagen Accord, on which we can build. More than 120 countries have now associated themselves with that accord, and that represents a broad and growing consensus. We now need to ensure that we live up to the commitments we made to each other in the accord, and reach out even more widely.¶ Copenhagen, despite those accords, was a strategic setback, but it was not by any means the end of the road. We need to be clear why it failed to live up to high expectations and why it did not deliver a legally binding deal.¶ Many people say that it failed because of process: The diplomats and the politicians had created a negotiation that was too difficult and too complex. But this misses the point. International treaties are an outcome, not an input, of political bargains. If you've made the political commitment to deliver, you can make the process work to deliver.¶ The real reason Copenhagen did not deliver on high expectations was a lack of political will. Many in developing countries saw a gap between the words and the deeds of the industrialized economies. They questioned whether we really believed our own rhetoric. And to answer those questions, we each need to start at home.¶ That is why the coalition government to which I belong has committed itself to being the greenest government ever in the United Kingdom, and why, with others in Europe, we are calling on the European Union to commit to a 30-percent cut in emissions by 2020 without waiting for the rest of the world to act.¶ The UK is already the world leader in offshore wind, with more projects installed, in planning and in construction than any other country in the world. We're undertaking the most radical transformation of our electricity sector ever. We aim to provide over 30 percent of our domestic electricity from renewables by 2020. We have committed to build no new coal-fired power stations without carbon capture and storage technology, and we've announced our intention to continue the demonstration projects of that.¶ And because it's imperative that foreign and domestic policies are mutually reinforcing, we must ensure that our approach is coherent. Now, that's one reason we have established the new British National Security Council: to ensure this happens across the full range of issues, including climate change.¶ And that's why I work hand in glove with Chris Huhne, the British Energy and Climate Change secretary, and Andrew Mitchell, the International Development secretary, to ensure that our domestic action reflects our level of international ambition.¶ But we won't succeed, of course, if we act alone. We must aim for a framework that is global and binding. It needs to be global because climate change affects everyone. Only a response that allows everyone a voice will generate a sense of common purpose and legitimacy. Only a response that is binding will convince investors that we intend to keep the promises we make to each other. Businesses need clear political signals, so let's show them an unequivocal green light.¶ We are now a few weeks away from the 16th Conference of Parties on Climate Change in Cancun. And I commend the consultative and collaborative approach Mexico has taken ahead of this meeting. Thanks to their determination and foresight, we have a chance in Cancun to regain momentum and make progress on key issues such as forests, technology, finance and transparency of commitments. Cancun will -- may not get us all the way to a full agreement, but it can put us back on track to one.¶ That said, the negotiations can't succeed inside a bubble. The negotiators in the U.N. process can't themselves build political will. They have to operate on the basis of current political realities in the countries they represent. And it's those realities that limit the ambition that we can set in the -- in such negotiations, and it's those realities that we now need to shift.¶ There is no global consensus on what climate change puts at risk, geopolitically and for the global economy, and thus on the scale and urgency of the response we need. We must build a global consensus if we are to guarantee our citizens security and prosperity. That is a job for foreign policy.¶ A fundamental purpose here for foreign policy is to shift the political debate, to create the political space for leaders and negotiators to reach agreement. We didn't get that right before Copenhagen, and we must get it right now.¶ So we urgently need to mobilize foreign ministers and the diplomats they lead, as well as institutions such as the Council on Foreign Relations, to put climate change at the heart of foreign- policy thinking.¶ When I became foreign secretary in May, I said the core goals of our foreign policy were to guarantee Britain's security and prosperity. Robust global action on climate change is essential to that agenda. That is why the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, under my leadership, is a vocal advocate for climate diplomacy. All British ambassadors carry the argument for a global low-carbon transition in their breast pocket or in their handbag. Climate change is part of their daily vocabulary, alongside the traditional themes of foreign policy. And they're supported by our unique network of climate attaches throughout the world.¶ The core assets of foreign policy are its networks and its convening power. Foreign policy can build political impulses to overcome barriers between sectors and cultures. In a networked world, diplomacy builds partnerships beyond government. And nowhere are those partnerships more vital than on climate.¶ So we must mobilize all our networks, not just across government but between governments, using organizations such as the Commonwealth as well. We must reach out, beyond, to NGOs, faith groups and businesses. And of all these, perhaps business engagement is the key to making a difference. It's business that will lead low-carbon transition. It's business that best understands the incentives needed to help us all prosper.¶ We must also harness scientific expertise in cutting-edge low- carbon technologies. The scientific community will develop the goods which will power the low-carbon economy and drive global ambition on climate change. And that's why the British government has a science and innovation network, which fosters collaborative research in the U.K. and other countries.¶ Now, what can the U.K. and the European Union do to make that fundamental shift and shape a global consensus on climate change? The most serious problem at Copenhagen, and the strongest brake on political will, was and is a lack of confidence in the low-carbon economy. Too few people in too few countries are yet convinced that a rapid move to low carbon is compatible with economic recovery and growth. They see the short-term economic and domestic stability risks before the opportunities and the longer-term risks of inaction.¶ There should be only one European response to that confidence gap. The EU, in my view, must accelerate its own progress and demonstrate that a low-carbon growth path makes us more competitive. I am convinced this is in the long-term interests of Europe's economy. We have learned painful lessons from the oil price shocks. We must modernize our infrastructure. The opportunities are out there. The global industry in low-carbon and environmental goods and services is already estimated to be worth up to 3.2 trillion pounds a year. Nearly a million British people are now employed in this sector, and that's why we are creating a green investment bank to ensure that we can properly support and develop low-carbon industry.¶ But we need to redouble our efforts, both in the EU (itself ?) and in our engagement with partners. Each of us as member states will be better able to accelerate if we're doing so together as the world's largest single market. And by opening up this effort through partnership with others, we can make it easier for them to accelerate, too.¶ So we'll be at the forefront of pushing for low-carbon modernization of Europe's infrastructure and energy policy. The European Union's budget until 2013 is set out in the current "financial perspective".¶ We will argue -- we will need to agree the financial perspective for the seven years after that, the period including our 2020 climate goals. And it's -- as ever, it's right that the EU budget should reflect the prevailing economic circumstances. It's also right that we direct the budget to today's challenges, not those of yesterday. And that means one that supports the transition to a low-carbon economy.¶ Action in Europe alone will not be enough. We need both the developed and developing world to take action. And this week Guido Westerwelle, the German foreign minister, and I have tasked our teams to come together to shape a coordinated, diplomacy-led effort on climate change, combining the strengths of our respective foreign services.¶ I've just put the case for bringing a new urgency for low-carbon transition within the EU. But together we should carry that urgency in external dialogues, whether they are with the United States, China or India.¶ The transition to low carbon will happen faster and maximize the benefit for all if the United States -- historically the world's largest emitter -- is at the leading edge. I recognize the political challenges that the U.S. administration faces and welcome President Obama's commitment to combat climate change. As he said in his State of the Union speech, "the nation that leads the clean-energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy."¶ Whatever the outcome of the upcoming midterm elections in the U.S., there is scope for political unity around an economic agenda that targets new energy opportunities and new jobs. American business understands this new market and should want to lead it. But to make these new clean-energy investments at the required pace and on a sufficient scale, they need the right incentives.¶ On climate, as in so many areas, the world looks to the US for leadership, because it has the economic clout and diplomatic leverage to shift the global debate.¶ And I look forward to working with the U.S. administration and indeed with the Council on Foreign Relations to raise global ambitions and put us back on the path to sustainable growth.¶ A key challenge for Europe is to build an economic partnership with China that reinforces the steps China is taking towards a low- carbon economy. These steps include its recent announcement of the five provinces and eight cities that have been designated as China's low-carbon pilots. Together these pilots cover 350 million people, so an ambitious approach to these schemes, tenaciously implemented, could provide a critical boost to global confidence in the concept of low- carbon development and help put China on the path to sustainable prosperity.¶ It could also produce huge two-way investment and partnership opportunities. Europe should place itself at the heart of these, working with China to maximize the ambition and the opportunities and to build the shared technology standards that will shape a global low- carbon market.¶ In China's case, low-carbon opportunity is matched by urgent low- carbon need. The pace of growth in China means average Chinese per- capita emissions could soon eclipse those of Europe. So while China has taken some very welcome steps, without a commitment from China to further decisive action, the efforts of others will be in vain.¶ The emerging economies face a dilemma. Often they are the most vulnerable to the direct effects of climate change. But they are concerned that action against climate change will adversely affect their development. The challenge to all countries is to have a high- growth, low-carbon economy. Some, like Brazil, which derives nearly half its energy from clean and renewable resources, are rising to that challenge.¶ India is another, embodying in microcosm the challenge that climate change poses to us all. Threatened by food, water and energy insecurity, India has responded with ambitious plans to generate 20 gigawatts of solar power by 2022.¶ South Africa, a coal-dependent economy, the success of which is so important to growth and prosperity within the continent, has made a significant offer to deviate their emissions from the business-as- usual pathway.¶ The opportunity is for the emerging economies -- for the emerging economies is to make a direct leap to low carbon, avoiding the high- carbon lock-in that we see in the developed world: a new, sustainable pathway for prosperity and security. A global low-carbon economy is not an idealist's pipe dream but a 21st-century realist's imperative. Countries that adapt quickly to a carbon-constrained world will be better able to deliver lasting prosperity for their citizens. As a Permanent Security Council member, I'm determined that the U.K. will play its full part in that, not least by supporting climate finance for the poorest.¶ Collectively, we share a responsibility to those most vulnerable to the impact of climate change. Bangladesh, with its densely populated coastal region, is particularly susceptible to rising sea levels. Glacial melt, sea-level rises and El Nino-type events threaten the lives of millions across South America. And the very existence of many small island states is under threat.¶ We have a shared vision to meet the Millennium Development Goals. But in a world without action on climate change, that vision will remain a dream, and the efforts of the last 10 years would¶ So climate change is one of the gravest threats to our security and prosperity. Unless we take robust and timely action to deal with it, no country will be immune to its effects. However difficult it might seem now, a global deal under the U.N. is the only response to this threat which will create the necessary confidence to drive a low- carbon transition.¶ We must be undaunted by the scale of the challenge.¶ We must continue to strive for agreement. We must not accept that because there is no consensus on a way forward now, that there never will be one. And to change the debate, we must imaginatively deploy all of the foreign policy assets in our armory until we've shaped that global consensus.¶ A successful response to climate change will not only stabilize the climate, but open the way to a future in which we can meet our needs through cooperation, in accordance with the ideals of the United Nations. Failure to do so will enhance competitive tendencies and make the world more dangerous, so this is not actually a hard choice.¶ We have to get this right. If we do, we can still shape our world. And if we don't, the world will determine our destiny for us.

Hague 2k10 [William Hague, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and Member of Parliament for Richmond, United Kingdom, “The Diplomacy of Climate Change,” 9/27/10]

climate change is the 21st century's biggest foreign- policy challenge, along with preventing the spread of nuclear weapons those two threats over the longer term are the biggest threats to the peace and security of the world We're at a very crucial point in the global debate on this subject Many people are questioning whether we should continue to seek a response to climate change through the U.N. and whether we can ever hope to deal with this enormous challenge an effective response to climate change underpins our security and prosperity; our response should be to strive for a binding global deal, whatever the setbacks; effective deployment of foreign policy assets is crucial to mobilizing the political will needed if we're going to shape an effective response a successful response to climate change must be a central objective this not only because I believe action against climate change is in line with a values-based foreign policy, but because it underpins our prosperity and security. You can't have food, water or energy security without climate security; . Plentiful, affordable food requires reliable and affordable access to water and energy Increasing dependence on coal, oil and gas threatens climate security, increasing the severity of floods and droughts, damaging food production, exacerbating the loss of biodiversity, and in countries that rely on hydropower, undermining energy security through the impact on the availability of water climate change will affect the prosperity and security of others around the world the pressing need for global solutions to global problems: cooperation not conflict, through frameworks and institutions embedded in the rule of law, and an international system that is fair and offers everyone a realistic prospect of security and prosperity. we've been striving to build an effective international response to climate change. But we have lacked the collective ambition required. These changes also threaten to sweep away the investments in development we have made, we believe this would be a strategic error. The real reason Copenhagen did not deliver on high expectations was a lack of political will we won't succeed, of course, if we act alone. We must aim for a framework that is global and binding. It needs to be global because climate change affects everyone Mexico has taken ahead of this meeting. Thanks to their determination and foresight, we have a chance in Cancun to regain momentum and make progress on key issues such as forests, technology, finance and transparency of commitments. There is no global consensus on what climate change puts at risk, geopolitically and for the global economy, and thus on the scale and urgency of the response we need. diplomacy builds partnerships beyond government. And nowhere are those partnerships more vital than on climate . Each of us as member states will be better able to accelerate if we're doing so together as the world's largest single market. coordinated, diplomacy-led effort on climate change, combining the strengths of our respective foreign services in a world without action on climate change, that vision will remain a dream, and the efforts of the last 10 years would climate change is one of the gravest threats to our security and prosperity. Unless we take robust and timely action to deal with it, no country will be immune to its effects. A successful response to climate change will not only stabilize the climate, but open the way to a future in which we can meet our needs through cooperation . We have to get this right. If we do, we can still shape our world. And if we don't, the world will determine our destiny for us.

US Diplomacy solves warming and proliferation

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Professor Anthony Bryant, a senior fellow at the Institute of International Relations of the University of the West Indies, explains the problem as follows: “The impact of Petro Caribe has been very dramatic. Since its inception, the financing mechanism is estimated to have saved members more than US$1bn in financing energy costs. In essence, the programme saved several regional economies from certain collapse. But while the programme has provided short-term relief, it has also become an addiction for its beneficiaries. Venezuela is today the largest creditor for Petro Caribe members”. And, he adds: “The programme has also contributed to the unsustainable debt accumulation in some of the countries”.¶ Professor Bryant’s analysis is not unique. The Economist Intelligence Unit and other commentators agree that the debt to Venezuela has become “unsustainable” for many of the Caribbean countries.¶ In reality, the debt has also become unsustainable for PDVSA, the Venezuelan oil company that has been the source of the credit to the many Caribbean countries. It is now clear that several of the Caribbean countries have not been repaying the debt and are not in a position to do so. In the circumstances, PDVSA and the Venezuelan government may be left with a huge debt. This would adversely affect the capacity of PDVSA to raise money from international lenders. Last month, Poor's Ratings Services lowered its long-term corporate credit and senior unsecured debt ratings on PDVSA to 'B' from 'B+'.

Sanders 7/14 [Sir Ronald—reporter for the Barbados Advocate- http://www.barbadosadvocate.com/newsitem.asp?more=columnists&NewsID=31512 -SR]

The impact of Petro Caribe has been very dramatic. the programme saved several regional economies from certain collapse. But while the programme has provided short-term relief, it has also become an addiction for its beneficiaries Venezuela is today the largest creditor for Petro Caribe members”. The programme has also contributed to the unsustainable debt accumulation in some of the countries the debt to Venezuela has become “unsustainable” for many of the Caribbean countries. the debt has also become unsustainable for PDVSA, the Venezuelan oil company that has been the source of the credit to the many Caribbean countries several of the Caribbean countries have not been repaying the debt and are not in a position to do the Venezuelan government may be left with a huge debt. This would adversely affect the capacity of PDVSA to raise money from international lenders

Petro Caribe collapse coming now-Venezuelan debt is the reason-it spills over

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Over half of Venezuela's federal budget revenues come from its oil industry, which also accounts for 95 percent of the country's exports. Estimated at 77 billion barrels, its proven reserves of black gold are the largest of any nation in the world.¶ Despite a troubled political relationship, its principal customer is the United States, which imports nearly a million barrels a day from Venezuela.¶ Venezuela's oil industry has been officially nationalised since the 1970s, and, as president, Chavez further tightened government control over its production. His government took a greater chunk of revenues and imposed quotas that ensured a certain percentage would always go directly towards aiding Venezuelans via social spending and fuel subsidies.¶ While these measures may be popular with Venezuelans, who pay the lowest price for gasoline in the world, critics argue such policies hampered growth and led to mismanagement of Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PdVSA), the main state-run oil company.¶ The same critics also point to increasing debt levels, slowdowns in productions and accidents stemming from faulty infrastructure.¶ In order to boost production, PdVSA agreed in May to accept a number of major loans. This includes one from Chevron, one of the largest U.S. oil companies, which will work with Venezuelans to develop new extraction sites.[related_articles]¶ "The oil sector is in deep trouble in Venezuela – production is down and the economic situation is deteriorating," explained Shifter. "They know they need foreign investment to increase production, and this is in part what has motivated Maduro to reach out."

Metzker 6/18 [Jared- reporter for the International--¶ http://www.international.to/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=8681:analysts-say-oil-could-help-mend-us-venezuela-relations&catid=268:inter-press-service&Itemid=377--SR]

Over half of Venezuela's federal budget revenues come from its oil industry Despite a troubled political relationship, its principal customer is the United States, which imports nearly a million barrels a day from Venezuela. His government took a greater chunk of revenues and imposed quotas that ensured a certain percentage would always go directly towards aiding Venezuelans via social spending and fuel subsidies .¶ In order to boost production, PdVSA agreed in May to accept a number of major loans. The oil sector is in deep trouble in Venezuela – production is down and the economic situation is deteriorating They know they need foreign investment to increase production, and this is in part what has motivated Maduro to reach out

Oil is key to Venezuelan stability-debt relief is key

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Venezuela is one of the world's largest exporters of crude oil and the largest in the Western Hemisphere. The oil sector is of central importance to the Venezuelan economy. As a founding member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), Venezuela is an important player in the global oil market.¶ In 2010, Venezuela consumed 3.2 quadrillion British thermal units (BTUs) of total energy. Oil represents the bulk of total energy consumption in Venezuela. Hydroelectricity and natural gas each account for over 20 percent, while coal accounts for the remainder of energy use. Over the last decade the share of oil consumption in the country's total energy mix has risen from 36 percent to 47 percent, largely because the Venezuelan government subsidizes liquid fuels.

EIA 2k12 [Energy Information Administration—US studies and analysis-- http://www.eia.gov/countries/cab.cfm?fips=VE ---October 12—SR]

Venezuela is one of the world's largest exporters of crude oil and the largest in the Western Hemisphere Venezuela is an important player in the global oil market Oil represents the bulk of total energy consumption in Venezuela Over the last decade the share of oil consumption in the country's total energy mix has risen from 36 percent to 47 percent, largely because the Venezuelan government subsidizes liquid fuels.

Venezuelan oil is key to global oil stability

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The crude realities: America uses approximately 19 million to 20 million barrels of oil per day, almost half of which is imported. If we lose just 1 million barrels per day, or suffer the type of damage sustained from Hurricane Katrina, the government will open the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which offers a mere six- to eight-week supply of unrefined crude oil. If we lose 1.5 million barrels per day, or approximately 7.5 percent, we will ask our allies in the 28-member International Energy Agency to open their SPRs and otherwise assist. If we lose 2 million barrels per day, or 10 percent, for a protracted period, government crisis monitors say the chaos will be so catastrophic, they cannot even model it. One government oil crisis source told me: "We cannot put a price tag on it. If it happens, just cash in your 401(k)." Exactly how could America be subjected to a protracted oil interruption — that is, a 10 percent shortfall lasting longer than several weeks? It will not come from hurricane action in the Gulf of Mexico, or even major refinery accidents or other oil infrastructure damage. Such damage would be repaired within days and the temporary losses absorbed by the small, half-million-barrel-per-day global cushion available. But a disruption of the vital Persian Gulf chokepoints — the Abqaiq processing plant in eastern Saudi Arabia, the Ras Tanura terminal on the Saudi Arabian coast, or the two-mile-wide sea lane of the Strait of Hormuz — would be devastating. If one, two or three of them is hit by terrorists flying hijacked jumbo jets or shut down by Iranian military action, as much as 40 percent of all seaborne oil will be stopped, as much as 18 percent of all global supply will be interrupted, and more than 10 percent of the U.S. supply will be cut off. Estimates on the U.S. shortfall suggest the percentage lost could be far higher. Repeat attacks, and the difficulty of anti-mine operations in a hostile environment, could prolong the crisis for many months — which is exactly what al-Qaeda and the Iranian regime have promised. Yet, apparently, there is no government plan. The best experts predict that if we suffer as much as a 10 percent shortfall for any period of time, let alone 20 percent, it will be a neighbor-against-neighbor, "Mad Max" scenario as food shortages swell and a storm of economic collapse surges across the country. Indeed, experts have been warning about this looming calamity for years. But the government and presidential candidates refuse to even consider the possibility or develop a contingency plan. Even if a secret plan exists, who would execute such a monumental undertaking? Yet American allies have developed oil contingency legislation and other administrative plans that will permit their nations to survive a stoppage. These measures include severe vehicle traffic reductions, enabling fast alternative fuel production and mass vehicle fuel retrofitting, as well as rush public transit enhancement and mandated changes in driving habits. Unquestionably, for America to survive such a catastrophe would require a very painful, multi-layered program of immediate-term, short-term, mid-term and long-term fixes that would change our society and transform it off of dependency on oil. Currently, the nation has no real alternative fuel delivery or retrofitting infrastructure. Lawmakers, mayors, governors and candidates have not developed such a plan during the half decade the interruption has been looming. The notion that Saudi Arabia can make up the shortfall from an Iranian disruption is impossible. Saudi oil too must pass through the narrow sea lanes of the Strait. The trans-Arabian Petroline that terminates at Yanbu can carry only a few million barrels per day, and a rush project to double its capacity would require an estimated $600 million and some two years of construction and chemical changes; this presupposes Iran would not simply attack the line with a barrage of medium range missiles from its Red Sea forward ports. For America to have prepared intelligently for a Persian Gulf oil interruption would have required a decade of planning. To absorb the hit from a sudden oil stoppage, as is now once again threatened, will be very painful indeed.

Black 12 (Edwin Black, American syndicated columnist, and journalist specializing in the historical interplay between economics and politics in the Middle East, “When the Pump Runs Dry, February 27)< http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2012-02-27/news/bs-ed-oil-interruption-20120227_1_crude-abqaiq-international-energy-agency

America uses approximately 19 million to 20 million barrels of oil per day, almost half of which is imported. If we lose 2 million barrels per day, or 10 percent, government crisis monitors say the chaos will be so catastrophic, they cannot even model it. We cannot put a price tag on it. If it happens, just cash in your 401(k). But a disruption would be devastating The best experts predict that if we suffer as much as a 10 percent shortfall for any period it will be a neighbor-against-neighbor, "Mad Max" scenario as food shortages swell and a storm of economic collapse But the government and presidential candidates refuse to even consider the possibility or develop a contingency plan These measures include severe vehicle traffic reductions for America to survive such a catastrophe would require a very painful, multi-layered program of immediate-term, short-term, mid-term and long-term fixes that would change our society and transform it off of dependency on oil. Currently, the nation has no real alternative fuel delivery or retrofitting infrastructure. To absorb the hit from a sudden oil stoppage, as is now once again threatened, will be very painful indeed.

Scenario 1: Oil Shocks

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RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 18 2013 (IPS) - Venezuela’s economic challenges, more than the uncertainty over who will succeed late president Hugo Chávez, could threaten the oil diplomacy he practiced in the region.¶ Cuba is the most obvious example. Oil imports from Venezuela cover half of the country’s energy needs, and have made Venezuela the Caribbean island nation’s top trading partner.¶ Cuba’s foreign trade grew fourfold between 2005 and 2011, to 8.3 billion dollars. And Venezuela’s share of the total increased from 23 percent in 2006 to 42 percent in 2011, according to an online article by Cuban economist Carmelo Mesa, who lives in the United States.¶ Cuba’s growing dependence on Venezuela has raised fears of a repeat of the severe shortage of essential goods, as well as frequent, lengthy blackouts, that Cuba suffered during the economic crisis of the 1990s triggered by the collapse of the Soviet Union and East European socialist bloc. Cuban economist Pável Vidal, a professor at the Javeriana Pontifical University in Cali, Colombia, said “Venezuela today represents around 20 percent of Cuba’s total trade in goods and services, while the Soviet Union represented 30 percent, and dependence was even stronger.”¶ This means the actual risk is lower, although “a decline, even a gradual one, in the links with Venezuela would spark a recession,” he told IPS in an email exchange.¶ He said an econometric projection indicates that a decline in Venezuela’s trade with Cuba could lead to a contraction of up to 10 percent of GDP and a two to three year recession as a result of a drop in foreign revenue and investment, external financial restrictions, and more costly imports, ,without payment facilities for oil.¶ A crisis of this kind would require “a complex and painful adjustment process,” Vidal said.¶ But technological dependence is not as marked as it was with the Soviet Union, Cuba’s foreign trade has diversified, and Cuba now has a strong tourism industry, which did not previously exist, as well as new instruments of macroeconomic regulation, he added.¶ However, the country is not in a position to weather a new crisis, he stressed. “Public wage earners and pensioners paid for the adjustments made to survive the crisis of the 1990s, but they could not do so today, because their buying power is just 27 percent of what is was in 1989,” Vidal said.

Osava 5/13 [Mario- correspondent for Inter-Press Service-- http://www.ipsnews.net/author/mario-osava/ -- 2013—SR]

- Venezuela’s economic challenges could threaten the oil diplomacy he practiced in the region Cuba is the most obvious example. Oil imports from Venezuela cover half of the country’s energy needs Cuba’s foreign trade grew fourfold between 2005 and 2011, to 8.3 billion dollars Cuba’s growing dependence on Venezuela has raised fears of a repeat of the severe shortage of essential goods, “Venezuela today represents around 20 percent of Cuba’s total trade in goods and services “a decline, even a gradual one, in the links with Venezuela would spark a recession,” a decline in Venezuela’s trade with Cuba could lead to a contraction of up to 10 percent of GDP and a two to three year recession as a result of a drop in foreign revenue and investment, external financial restrictions, and more costly imports, ,without payment facilities for oil A crisis of this kind would require “a complex and painful adjustment process But technological dependence is not as marked as it was with the Soviet Union, Cuba’s foreign trade has diversified, and Cuba now has a strong tourism industry However, the country is not in a position to weather a new crisis, Public wage earners and pensioners paid for the adjustments made to survive the crisis of the 1990s, but they could not do so today, because their buying power is just 27 percent of what is was in 1989,”

Scenario 2: Cuban Economy

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Regardless of the succession, under the current U.S. policy, Cuba’s problems of a post Castro transformation only worsen. In addition to Cubans on the island, there will be those in exile who will return claiming authority. And there are remnants of the dissident community within Cuba who will attempt to exercise similar authority. A power vacuum or absence of order will create the conditions for instability and civil war. Whether Raul or another successor from within the current government can hold power is debatable. However, that individual will nonetheless extend the current policies for an indefinite period, which will only compound the Cuban situation. When Cuba finally collapses anarchy is a strong possibility if the U.S. maintains the “wait and see” approach. The U.S. then must deal with an unstable country 90 miles off its coast. In the midst of this chaos, thousands will flee the island. During the Mariel boatlift in 1980 125,000 fled the island.26 Many were criminals; this time the number could be several hundred thousand fleeing to the U.S., creating a refugee crisis.¶ Equally important, by adhering to a negative containment policy, the U.S. may be creating its next series of transnational criminal problems. Cuba is along the axis of the drug-trafficking flow into the U.S. from Columbia. The Castro government as a matter of policy does not support the drug trade. In fact, Cuba’s actions have shown that its stance on drugs is more than hollow rhetoric as indicated by its increasing seizure of drugs – 7.5 tons in 1995, 8.8 tons in 1999, and 13 tons in 2000.27 While there may be individuals within the government and outside who engage in drug trafficking and a percentage of drugs entering the U.S. may pass through Cuba, the Cuban government is not the path of least resistance for the flow of drugs. If there were no Cuban restraints, the flow of drugs to the U.S. could be greatly facilitated by a Cuba base of operation and accelerate considerably.¶ In the midst of an unstable Cuba, the opportunity for radical fundamentalist groups to operate in the region increases. If these groups can export terrorist activity from Cuba to the U.S. or throughout the hemisphere then the war against this extremism gets more complicated. Such activity could increase direct attacks and disrupt the economies, threatening the stability of the fragile democracies that are budding throughout the region. In light of a failed state in the region, the U.S. may be forced to deploy military forces to Cuba, creating the conditions for another insurgency. The ramifications of this action could very well fuel greater anti-American sentiment throughout the Americas. A proactive policy now can mitigate these potential future problems.

Gorrell, Lieutenant Colonel, 2005 (Tim, “CUBA: THE NEXT UNANTICIPATED ANTICIPATED STRATEGIC CRISIS?” March 18, Online: http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA433074)

under the current U.S. policy, Cuba’s problems of a post Castro transformation only worsen. In addition to Cubans on the island, there will be those in exile who will return claiming authority. there are remnants of the dissident community within Cuba who will attempt to exercise similar authority. A power vacuum or absence of order will create the conditions for instability and civil war Raul or another successor will nonetheless extend the current policies for an indefinite period, which will only compound the Cuban situation. When Cuba finally collapses anarchy is a strong possibility if the U.S. maintains the “wait and see” approach. The U.S. then must deal with an unstable country 90 miles off its coast thousands will flee the island. Many were criminals; this time the number could be several hundred thousand fleeing to the U.S., creating a refugee crisis Cuba is along the axis of the drug-trafficking flow into the U.S. from Columbia. there were no Cuban restraints, the flow of drugs to the U.S. could be greatly facilitated by a Cuba base of operation and accelerate considerably. In the midst of an unstable Cuba, the opportunity for radical fundamentalist groups to operate in the region increases. If these groups can export terrorist activity from Cuba to the U.S. or throughout the hemisphere then the war against this extremism gets more complicate . In light of a failed state in the region, the U.S. may be forced to deploy military forces to Cuba, creating the conditions for another insurgency. The ramifications of this action could very well fuel greater anti-American sentiment throughout the Americas

Cuban instability collapse causes Latin American instability and terror attacks

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Until recently, the primary U.S. concern about Brazil¶ has been that it might acquire nuclear weapons and¶ delivery systems. In the 1970s, the Brazilian military¶ embarked on a secret program to develop an atom bomb. By¶ the late 1980s, both Brazil and Argentina were aggressively¶ pursuing nuclear development programs that had clear¶ military spin-offs.¶ 54¶ There were powerful military and¶ civilian advocates of developing nuclear weapons and¶ ballistic missiles within both countries. Today, however, the¶ situation has changed. As a result of political leadership¶ transitions in both countries, Brazil and Argentina now¶ appear firmly committed to restricting their nuclear¶ programs to peaceful purposes. They have entered into¶ various nuclear-related agreements with each other—most¶ notably the quadripartite comprehensive safeguards¶ agreement (1991), which permits the inspection of all their¶ nuclear installations by the International Atomic Energy¶ 26gency—and have joined the Missile Technology Control¶ Regime. ¶ Even so, no one can be certain about the future. As Scott¶ Tollefson has observed:¶ . . . the military application of Brazil’s nuclear and space¶ programs depends less on technological considerations than¶ on political will. While technological constraints present a¶ formidable barrier to achieving nuclear bombs and ballistic¶ missiles, that barrier is not insurmountable. The critical¶ element, therefore, in determining the applications of Brazil’s¶ nuclear and space technologies will be primarily political.¶ 55¶ Put simply, if changes in political leadership were¶ instrumental in redirecting Brazil’s nuclear program¶ towards peaceful purposes, future political upheavals could¶ still produce a reversion to previous orientations. Civilian¶ supremacy is not so strong that it could not be swept away¶ by a coup, especially if the legitimacy of the current¶ democratic experiment were to be undermined by economic¶ crisis and growing poverty/inequality. Nor are civilian¶ leaders necessarily less militaristic or more committed to¶ democracy than the military. The example of Peru’s¶ Fujimori comes immediately to mind.¶ How serious a threat might Brazil potentially be? It has¶ been estimated that if the nuclear plant at Angra dos Reis¶ (Angra I) were only producing at 30 percent capacity, it¶ could produce five 20-kiloton weapons a year. If production¶ from other plants were included, Brazil would have a¶ capability three times greater than India or Pakistan.¶ Furthermore, its defense industry already has a substantial¶ missile producing capability. On the other hand, the¶ country has a very limited capacity to project its military¶ power via air and sealift or to sustain its forces over long¶ distances. And though a 1983 law authorizes significant¶ military manpower increases (which could place Brazil at a¶ numerical level slightly higher than France, Iran and¶ Pakistan), such growth will be restricted by a lack of¶ economic resources. Indeed, the development of all these¶ military potentials has been, and will continue to be,¶ 27everely constrained by a lack of money. (Which is one¶ reason Brazil decided to engage in arms control with¶ Argentina in the first place.)¶ 56¶ In short, a restoration of Brazilian militarism, imbued¶ with nationalistic ambitions for great power status, is not¶ unthinkable, and such a regime could present some fairly¶ serious problems. That government would probably need¶ foreign as well as domestic enemies to help justify its¶ existence. One obvious candidate would be the United¶ States, which would presumably be critical of any return to¶ dictatorial rule. Beyond this, moreover, the spectre of a¶ predatory international community, covetous of the riches¶ of the Amazon, could help rally political support to the¶ regime. For years, some Brazilian military officers have¶ been warning of “foreign intervention.” Indeed, as far back¶ as 1991 General Antenor de Santa Cruz Abreu, then chief of¶ the Military Command of the Amazon, threatened to¶ transform the region into a “new Vietnam” if developed¶ countries tried to “internationalize” the Amazon.¶ Subsequently, in 1993, U.S.-Guyanese combined military¶ exercises near the Brazilian border provoked an angry¶ response from many high-ranking Brazilian officers.¶ 5

Schulz 2k [Donald E., Ph.D., Chair of Political Science at Cleveland State U., fmr. Research Professor of National Security at the Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army College, March 200, “The United States and Latin America: Shaping an Elusive Future”, Strategic Studies Institute]

the primary U.S. concern about Brazil has been that it might acquire nuclear weapons and delivery systems the Brazilian military embarked on a secret program to develop an atom bomb There were powerful military and civilian advocates of developing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles within both countries Brazil now appear firmly committed to restricting their nuclear programs to peaceful purposes. no one can be certain about the future. the military application of Brazil’s nuclear and space programs depends less on technological considerations than on political will. While technological constraints present a formidable barrier to achieving nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles, that barrier is not insurmountable , if changes in political leadership were instrumental in redirecting Brazil’s nuclear program towards peaceful purposes, future political upheavals could still produce a reversion to previous orientations especially if the legitimacy of the current democratic experiment were to be undermined by economic crisis and growing poverty/inequality It has been estimated that if the nuclear plant at Angra dos Reis were only producing at 30 percent capacity, it could produce five 20-kiloton weapons a year. If production from other plants were included, Brazil would have a capability three times greater than India or Pakistan the country has a very limited capacity to project its military power via air and sealift or to sustain its forces over long distances. Indeed, the development of all these military potentials has been, and will continue to be, everely constrained by a lack of money a restoration of Brazilian militarism, imbued with nationalistic ambitions for great power status, is not unthinkable, and such a regime could present some fairly serious problems. That government would probably need foreign as well as domestic enemies to help justify its existence. One obvious candidate would be the United States, which would presumably be critical of any return to dictatorial rule some Brazilian military officers have been warning of “foreign intervention

That causes Brazilian nuclear re-arm

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Brazil and Argentinas actions to reverse their nuclear programs are generally cited as a success story for nonproliferation. However, some doubts remain. Both nations, particularly Brazil, remain nuclear capable, and some analysts have questioned whether Brazil has entirely renounced its weapons program. For the time being, however, most indications are that the two countries are sincere in their efforts to prevent a nuclear arms race in South America. In fact, Brazil is part of the New Agenda group pushing the Nuclear Weapons States to uphold their NPT commitments to nuclear disarmament.

GSI 2k12 [Global Security Institute--http://gsinstitute.org/dpe/countries/argentina_brazil- May 22, 2012-SR]

Brazil cited as a success story for nonproliferation. However, some doubts remain Brazil, remain nuclear capable, and some analysts have questioned whether Brazil has entirely renounced its weapons program indications are that the countries are sincere in their efforts to prevent a nuclear arms race in South America.

Causes South American arms race

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In Washington, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters that the Obama administration is worried about the spectre of an arms race in South America. "We hope that we can see a change in behaviour and attitude on the part of the Venezuelan government," she said.¶ But it is not just Venezuela who is bulking up. In addition to Brazil and Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Peru and even Bolivia are also buying new military gear.¶ After South America's infamous dictatorships of the 1980s, most of the ensuing civilian governments actively neglected their armed forces for political reasons.¶ Today, only Argentina continues that policy and many regional analysts believe the investment in modern weaponry is long overdue.¶ Defence spending in the region is among the lowest in the world, on average 2 per cent of a country's gross domestic product, notes Rosendo Fraga, a historian and political analyst who's an expert on Latin America's armed forces. Still, he cautions that the most important countries in the region are buying weapons at a moment of tension and that this could be risky.¶ "Nobody wants a war in South America. It's clear," says Fraga. "But the situation involving Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador is very tense at this moment. And there's a historical conflict involving Peru, Chile and Bolivia.

Watson 2k10 [Connie, senior reporter for CBS-- http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2009/10/02/f-rfa-watson.html -January 25th, 2010- SR]

the Obama administration is worried about the spectre of an arms race in South America. Brazil and Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Peru and even Bolivia are also buying new military gear After South America's infamous dictatorships of the 1980s, most of the ensuing civilian governments actively neglected their armed forces for political reasons Defence spending in the region is among the lowest in the world, on average 2 per cent of a country's gross domestic product he cautions that the most important countries in the region are buying weapons at a moment of tension and that this could be risky. "Nobody wants a war in South America. It's clear But the situation involving Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador is very tense at this moment.

That causes global nuclear war

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Dartmouth DDI

Affirmatives

2013

How exactly could Brazil go about building nuclear weapons? The answer, unfortunately, is that it would be relatively easy. A precondition for the legal construction of small reactors for submarine engines is that nuclear material regulated by the IAEA is approved. But because Brazil designates its production facilities for nuclear submarine construction as restricted military areas, the IAEA inspectors are no longer given access. In other words, once the legally supplied enriched uranium has passed through the gate of the plant where nuclear submarines are being built, it can be used for any purpose, including the production of nuclear weapons. And because almost all nuclear submarines are operated with highly enriched uranium, which also happens to be weapons grade uranium, Brazil can easily justify producing highly enriched nuclear fuel.

Ruhle 2k10 [Hans, analyst for Speigal Online International-- http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nuclear-proliferation-in-latin-america-is-brazil-developing-the-bomb-a-693336.html -May 7th, 2010-SR]

How exactly could Brazil go about building nuclear weapons it would be relatively easy. because Brazil designates its production facilities for nuclear submarine construction as restricted military areas, the IAEA inspectors are no longer given access. once the legally supplied enriched uranium has passed through the gate of the plant where nuclear submarines are being built, it can be used for any purpose, including the production of nuclear weapons

Legal restrictions don’t matter

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2013

People around the globe believe that China will inevitably replace the United States as the world’s leading superpower, but that doesn’t mean they like the prospect, according to a new study on global attitudes. The survey that the Pew Research Center conducted in 39 countries confirms much of the conventional wisdom in Washington about the shifting balance of power between the United States and China. Mutual tensions are rising, with Americans’ favorable opinions of China dropping from 51 percent two years ago to 37 percent now and a similar drop among Chinese — from 58 percent to 40 percent — with respect to the United States. China’s economic might is perceived as rising and the United States’ as declining, and although many countries still see the United States as the top economic power, many believe that it is only a matter of time before China supplants it. Despite the shifting attitudes, however, the United States generally enjoys a better image abroad. On the question of which country they view as a partner, more nations had a majority naming the United States rather than China. The survey on global attitudes was the largest that Pew has conducted since 2007. China was widely admired by respondents — especially in Africa and Latin America — for its scientific and technological advances, according to the survey, but Chinese ideas and popular culture were less well-received. The positive views of China in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa reflect heavy Chinese investment in those regions in recent decades.

Wan 7/17(Wan is a China correspondent, based in Shanghai and Beijing. He previously served as diplomatic correspondent focusing on U.S.-Asia policy. He was part of the Post’s 2010 Pulitzer finalist team that covered the Fort Hood shootings and has won multiple awards his coverage of religion. He has worked as a metro reporter for Los Angeles Times, a rewrite man for The Baltimore Sun and a staff writer for The Washington Post since 2005.. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/global-attitudes-reflect-shifting-us-china-power-balance-survey-concludes/2013/07/17/7f51a94c-eeed-11e2-bed3-b9b6fe264871_story.html “Global attitudes reflect shifting U.S.-China power balance, survey concludes”)

China will inevitably replace the United States as the world’s leading superpower Pew Research Center conducted in 39 countries confirms much of the conventional wisdom in Washington about the shifting balance of power between the United States and China. many believe that it is only a matter of time before China supplants it. China was widely admired by respondents — especially in Africa and Latin America for its scientific and technological advances, according to the survey The positive views of China in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa reflect heavy Chinese investment in those regions in recent decades.

China is rising now and Latin America is fueling it. US – LA relations are key to hegemony

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Dartmouth DDI

Affirmatives

2013

During the first weekend of June, U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in California to discuss cyber espionage and territorial claims in the Pacific Rim. While tension on these topics has hogged the headlines, the fight for influence in another area could be even more important—Latin America. Other emerging markets in Africa, where China has an overwhelming influence due to foreign direct investment in mining and oil, also offer economic opportunities, but Latin America has an abundance of natural resources, greater purchasing power, and geographic proximity to the United States, which has long considered Latin America as its “backyard.” The key question now is will Latin American countries lean more toward China or the United States, or will it find a way to balance the two against each other? Right now, Latin American countries are increasingly confident thanks to burgeoning economic and political integration by way of trading blocs, and they're demanding to be treated as an equal player. As a sign of its growing importance, China and the United States have courted Latin America more than usual. In May, President Barack Obama visited Mexico and Costa Rica while Vice President Joe Biden visited Colombia, Brazil, and Trinidad and Tobago. Shortly after these trips, President Xi went to Mexico and Costa Rica to foster economic cooperation. China’s active involvement in Latin American geopolitics can be traced back to 2009. Chinalco, China’s largest mining company, signed a $2.2 billion deal with Peru to build the Toromocho mine and a $70 million wharf in the Callao port. Since then, Peru has sent 18.3 percent of its exports to China, making China Peru’s largest trading partner. China’s imports to Peru, however, rank second with 13.7 percent of the market while the United States holds first place with 24.5 percent. China has the upper hand with the Latin American leftist countries in terms of infrastructure and technology. In 2009, Chinese telephone manufacturer ZTE played an instrumental role in assembling the first mobile phone in Venezuela known as “El Vergatario” (Venezuela slang for optimal). Former President Hugo Chávez introduced this new phone to low-income families making it the world’s cheapest phone ($6.99 for a handset). Additionally, China landed rail construction projects in Argentina and Venezuela and has become a major buyer of farm products and metal in South America. Between 2011 and 2012, China purchased nearly 58.02 million tons of soy from Argentina, up from 52 million in 2011 and 2010. China has also maintained an active market with Brazil. Chinese oil company Sinopec and China Development Bank offered Brazilian oil company Petrobras a $10 billion loan in 2009 in return for hundreds of thousands of barrels per day. In 2011, three Chinese metal companies purchased Brazilian mining company Companhia Brasileira de Metalurgia e Mineracao. China’s boldest move in the region is the possible construction of a massive canal in Nicaragua. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega pushed the National Assembly to approve the multi-billion dollar plan in June. The Nicaraguan canal would have a larger draft, length, and depth than the Panama and Suez canals, and the enactment granted a Hong Kong-based company permission to build and control the canal for nearly 100 years. The approval of this plan, however, raised the ire of environmentalists and neighboring Colombia, which recently lost 70,000 square kilometers of its Caribbean maritime territory to Nicaragua before the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Last May, Colombian diplomat Noemi Sanin claimed that China had influenced ICJ’s decision. According to Sanin, Chinese justice Xue Hanqin knew beforehand about Nicaragua’s intention to grant the canal construction to China since Xue was a colleague of Carlos Arguello, a role-player in the maritime case. There is no evidence for this, but it shows Colombia’s anxiety of China’s growing clout in the region and how it can upset balances of power.

Valencia 7/10(Robert Valencia, World Policy Institute, 10 July 2013, “US and China: The Fight for Latin America” http://www.isn.ethz.ch/Digital-Library/Articles/Detail/?id=166209)

. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in California to discuss cyber espionage and territorial claims in the Pacific Rim the fight for influence in another area could be even more important Latin America has an abundance of natural resources, greater purchasing power, and geographic proximity to the United States, which has long considered Latin America as its “backyard.” Latin American countries lean more toward China or the United States Latin American countries are increasingly confident thanks to burgeoning economic and political integration by way of trading blocs China and the United States have courted Latin America more than usua President Barack Obama visited Mexico and Costa Rica while Vice President Joe Biden visited Colombia, Brazil, and Trinidad and Tobago. Shortly after these trips, President Xi went to Mexico and Costa Rica to foster economic cooperation. China has the upper hand with the Latin American leftist countries in terms of infrastructure and technology Chinese telephone manufacturer ZTE played an instrumental role in assembling the first mobile phone in Venezuela known as “El Vergatario China has also maintained an active market with Brazil. Chinese oil company Sinopec and China Development Bank offered Brazilian oil company Petrobras a $10 billion loan in 2009 in return for hundreds of thousands of barrels per day China’s boldest move in the region is the possible construction of a massive canal in Nicaragua. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega pushed the National Assembly to approve the multi-billion dollar plan in Jun

Latin America is key piece for the symbolism of American power

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2013

The U.S. Secretary to the Treasury should investigate the U.S. and IFIs debt portfolios in order to determine if portions of a given LIC’s loan portfolio should be declared illegitimate and odious. Odious or illegitimate debt stemming from situations in which corrupt regimes received loans from IFIs, bilateral lenders, and multilateral lenders in order to support the West’s geopolitical objectives rather than satisfying the financial, social or economic needs of the citizens should be forgiven as they violate international law. Since representatives of borrowing governments will not be personally held responsible for paying back loans, they often engage in reckless borrowing. Similarly, creditors take advantage of systemic vulnerability and make inappropriate loan commitments. Rather than unfairly burdening developing nations with debt that should never have existed in the first place, odious or illegitimate debt should, lawfully and morally, be nullified. Cancelling illegal debt would alleviate economic pressure on developing nations, allowing them to better fund social service programs and infrastructure projects as well as service legitimate debt to responsible lenders.

Jubilee 12’ (Jubilee U.S.A. Network, an alliance working for the definitive cancellation of crushing debt to fight poverty and injustice in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. March 2012, The Responsible Lending and Borrowing Imperative: Addressing the Root Causes of Poverty)MN

The U.S. Secretary to the Treasury should investigate debt in order to determine if portions of a given LIC’s loan portfolio should be declared illegitimate and odious from situations in which corrupt regimes received loans from IFIs, bilateral lenders, and multilateral lenders in order to support the West’s geopolitical objectives rather than satisfying the financial, social or economic needs of the citizens Similarly, creditors take advantage of systemic vulnerability and make inappropriate loan commitments. Rather than unfairly burdening developing nations with debt that should never have existed in the first place, odious or illegitimate debt should, lawfully and morally, be nullified. Cancelling illegal debt would alleviate economic pressure on developing nations, allowing them to better fund social service programs and infrastructure projects as well as service legitimate debt to responsible lenders.

U.S. should cancel debt that disproportionately punishes the citizens for the faults of regimes taking out loans to serve western interests

Venezuela Debt Relief Affirmative - DDI 2013 SS.html5

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2013

The damage that neoliberal globalization has done to human lives and to the non-human environment raises profound questions about the rationality of this system. The inequalities in way that this damage has been distributed raise further questions about the system’s justice. Although these questions are among the most urgent currently faced by feminist philosophers, I do not address them directly here. Instead, I undertake the more modest project of challenging the debt that many poor nations in the global South supposedly owe to international lending institutions and to a few rich nations in the global North. This debt is one of the chief mechanisms maintaining global neoliberalism, because it binds together Southern debtors and Northern creditors in a system disproportionately advantageous to the global North. I shall argue that many of the South’s supposed debt obligations are not morally binding. Restricting my focus to this question allows me to stay within a broadly liberal framework, accepting assumptions that a deeper investigation would bring into question. Relying only on intuitively plausible liberal assumptions, I shall briefly question, first, the democratic legitimacy of much Southern debt, and second, the fairness of the accounting system used to calculate it.

Jagger 02’ (Allison M. Jagger, Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, A Feminist Critique of the Alleged Southern Debt, Hypatia 17.4 Fall 2002.) MN

The inequalities in way that this damage has been distributed raise further questions about the system’s justice the debt that many poor nations in the global South supposedly owe to international lending institutions and to a few rich nations in the global North is one of the chief mechanisms maintaining global neoliberalism, because it binds together Southern debtors and Northern creditors in a system disproportionately advantageous to the global North elying only on intuitively plausible liberal assumptions, I shall briefly question, first, the democratic legitimacy of much Southern debt, and second, the fairness of the accounting system used to calculate it.

Cancellation of Venezuela’s debt is a key step to breaking down the global neoliberal system

Venezuela Debt Relief Affirmative - DDI 2013 SS.html5

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2013

But their loans add to the debt burden and come with conditions. Governments have to agree to impose very strict economic programs on their countries in order to reschedule their debts or borrow more money. These programs are known as Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs). SAPs have particularly affected the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, whose economies are already the poorest in the world.SAPping the Poor SAPs consist of measures designed to help a country repay its debts by earning more hard currency - increasing exports and decreasing imports. In a few countries SAPs appear to have had some good effect; in most they have worsened the economic situation. In all countries applying SAPs, the poor have been hit the hardest. In order to obtain more foreign currency, governments implementing SAPs usually have to: spend less on health, education and social services - people pay for them or go without Devalue the national currency, lowering export earnings and increasing import costs Cut back on food subsidies - so prices of essentials can soar in a matter of days Cut jobs and wages for workers in government industries and services Encourage privatization of public industries, including sale to foreign investors Take over small subsistence farms for large-scale export crop farming instead of staple foods. So farmers are left with no land to grow their own food and few are employed on the large farms.

Jubilee No date (Jubilee U.S.A. Network, , an alliance working for the definitive cancellation of crushing debt to fight poverty and injustice in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. How it All Began: Causes of the debt crisis.) MN

But their loans add to the debt burden and come with conditions These programs are known as Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs). Poor SAPs consist of measures designed to help a country repay its debts by earning more hard currency In a few countries SAPs appear to have had some good effect; in most they have worsened the economic situation. In all countries applying SAPs, the poor have been hit the hardest. In order to obtain more foreign currency, governments implementing SAPs usually have to: spend less on health, education and social services Devalue the national currency Cut jobs and wages for workers in government industries and services Encourage privatization of public industries, including sale to foreign investors

SAP’S force governments to cut back on programs to help its citizens and force it to conform to western standards of economic prosperities- furthering the poverty inside the indebted countries

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2013

The case of Venezuela provides an illustration of the role of structural adjustment in producing increased domestic conflict, a weakened democratic system and repression. As Di John (2005:114) writes: A few weeks after the announcement of [structural adjustment] reforms, Venezuela experienced the bloodiest urban riots since the urban guerrilla warfare of the 1960s. The riots, known as the ‘‘Caracazo,’’ occurred in late February 1989. A doubling of gasoline prices, which were passed on by private bus companies, induced the outburst. . . . The riots that ensued were contained by a relatively undisciplined military response that left more than 350 dead in two days. Although Venezuela’s democratic system has been maintained, over the period of this study, dissatisfaction with economic policies has played a part in three attempted coups, multiple general strikes, two presidential assassination attempts, and has led to several states of emergency being imposed. Even today, debate over structural adjustment policies in Venezuela remains heated. President Hugo Chavez sustains his popularity largely based on his opposition to the kind of unregulated economic liberalization advocated by the IMF and the Bank (Banks, Muller, and Overstreet 2003) The findings presented here have important policy implications. There is mounting evidence that national economies grow fastest when basic human rights are respected (Sen 1999; Kaufmann 2004; Kaufmann, Kraay, and Mastruzzi 2005). SAAs place too much emphasis on instituting a freer market and too little emphasis on allowing the other human freedoms necessary for rapid economic growth to take root and grow. By undermining the human rights conditions necessary for economic development, the Bank is damaging its own mission

Adouharb Cingranelli 06’ (M. RODWAN ABOUHARB, DAVID L. CINGRANELLI, International Relations department of the University College London, Professor of Political Science at Binghamton University, 2006, International Studies Quarterly (2006) 50 p.233-262)

The case of Venezuela provides an illustration of the role of structural adjustment in producing increased domestic conflict A few weeks after the announcement of [structural adjustment] reforms, Venezuela experienced the bloodiest urban riots since the urban guerrilla warfare of the 1960s. Although Venezuela’s democratic system has been maintained, over the period of this study, dissatisfaction with economic policies has played a part in three attempted coups, multiple general strikes, two presidential assassination attempts, and has led to several states of emergency being imposed. Chavez sustains his popularity largely based on his opposition to the kind of unregulated economic liberalization advocated by the IMF and the Bank There is mounting evidence that national economies grow fastest when basic human rights are respected

Previous SAP’s in Venezuela are the cause of the governmental problems that have played out throughout venezuela’s history

Venezuela Debt Relief Affirmative - DDI 2013 SS.html5

Dartmouth DDI

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2013

Taking on further debts is likely to be one of Venezuela's mechanisms to feed the Ancillary Foreign Currency Administration System (Sicad) with US dollars.¶ The State, its decentralized bodies, or any other institution will be able to issue bonds in US dollars. Such bonds will be paid by companies or individuals in bolivars and then be sold abroad to obtain foreign currencies.¶ In addition to indebtedness, Sicad is expected to be fed with US dollars provided by the National Development Fund, which receives petrodollars; the Central Bank of Venezuela (BVV); and private companies interested in doing the same.¶ The lack of US dollars in the country has led to basic staple shortage. It all seems that unlike its predecessor –the Transaction System for Foreign Currency Denominated Securities (Sitme)–, Sicad will turn, in the middle run, into another system constantly bringing foreign debt up.¶ In the meantime, Venezuela's gold reserves, which comprise 70% of the country's international reserves, fell in the first quarter 25% or some USD 5.29 billion based on the value of gold up to July 5th.

Salmeron 6/8 [http://www.eluniversal.com/economia/130708/venezuelan-govt-likely-get-into-debt-to-supply-sicad-with-us-dollars—Victor-senior reporter for El Universal-SR]

Taking on further debts is likely to be one of Venezuela's mechanisms to feed with US dollars its decentralized bodies, will be able to issue bonds in US dollars. Such bonds will be paid by companies or individuals in bolivars and then be sold abroad to obtain foreign currencies the Central Bank of Venezuela (BVV); and private companies interested in doing the same. The lack of US dollars in the country has led to basic staple shortage

The dollar is key

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2013

THE West's claim that its sanctions are targeted at the Zanu-PF leadership in Zimbabwe have been exposed for the sham they are by a WikiLeaks cable released yesterday that shows that the US government directed the IMF not to restore Zimbabwe's voting rights and lines of credit.¶ The IMF has over the years masqueraded as a multilateral institution that operates independently of the whims and caprices of its host, the US government.¶ One of the cables, dated September 2005, from New Zealand, titled "New Zealand: Response to demarche on Zimbabwe Vote in IMF," and directed to the New Zealand Agency for International Development, which handles issues related to the IMF, shows that the US controls the IMF and played a lead role in blocking the IMF from reinstating Zimbabwe's voting and borrowing rights.¶ "On September 2 (2005), a representative of New Zealand's Treasury noted Zimbabwe's decision to pay back US$120 million of the US $290 million it owes the Fund. The representative asked whether the US government would now consider Zimbabwe to be in compliance with its IMF obligations, or whether the United States still believes Zimbabwe should be expelled from the Fund.¶ "Post seeks Department guidance on how it should respond to these questions. Post also notes that the Treasury representative is due to deliver a recommendation on the issue to New Zealand's Finance Minister on September 5 (2005) and that a response by COB September 2 (Washington) would be very helpful," reads the cable signed by one Burnett¶ Analysts say the cable is disturbing given that Finance Minister Tendai Biti has received many "technical experts" from the IMF and only recently wanted Zimbabwe declared a "Highly Indebted Poor Country" at the behest of the IMF, a development that would have seen the IMF, and consequently the US by proxy, take over and direct not only the country's economic affairs but also the exploitation of its natural resources.

Herald 2k10 [The Herald News-- http://raceandhistory.com/selfnews/viewnews.cgi?newsid1292867839,44248,.shtml --December 20—SR]

The IMF has over the years masqueraded as a multilateral institution that operates independently of the whims and caprices of its host, the US government. Response to demarche on Zimbabwe Vote in IMF," and directed to the New Zealand Agency for International Development, which handles issues related to the IMF, shows that the US controls the IMF and played a lead role in blocking the IMF from reinstating Zimbabwe's voting and borrowing rights. The representative asked whether the US government would now consider Zimbabwe to be in compliance with its IMF obligations, or whether the United States still believes Zimbabwe should be expelled from the Fund.

US controls the IMF

Venezuela Debt Relief Affirmative - DDI 2013 SS.html5

Dartmouth DDI

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2013

Any local economy that is integrated into the global economy is exposed to the vicissitudes of world trade; for example, SAPs’ promotion of cash crop agriculture has made many countries in the global South vulnerable to drops in world prices or their crops. At the same time, the shift to cash crop agriculture has encouraged these countries to become permanently dependent on Northern machines and fertilizers.2 Thus, SAPs have ensured a “captive” supply of cheap labor, cheap raw materials and agricultural products for Northern industries, and have simultaneously created guaranteed markets for Northern manufactured products, technologies, and consumer goods. In a world where the terms of trade for raw materials and agricultural products have tended historically to worsen (with a few conspicuous, nonrenewable exceptions, such as oil), the South’s need for Northern products and capital has inevitably made the North richer and the South poorer. Although SAPs are advertised as promoting economic development in the global South, they have harmed rather than helped development in many debtor nations. World Bank theory predicted that imposing these loan conditions would stimulate a virtuous economic circle of growth, rising employment, and rising investment. In fact, however, the growth rates of most debtor countries have been significantly reduced, living standards in many have declined, and some have become trapped in a vicious cycle of stagnation and decline caused by the interaction of low investment, increased unemployment, reduced social spending, reduced consumption, and low output. It is signifi cant that some of the countries that are worst off are the most integrated into the global economy; for instance, exports account for close to 30 percent of the gross domestic product of impoverished sub-Saharan Africa, compared to less than 20 percent for industrialized nations. Many Southern countries are now in a state of economic collapse and their debt burdens have multiplied. By 1997, the total debt stock owed by the developing world to the developed world was $217 TRILLION, up from $1.4 trillion in 1990. Although SAPs have been largely counterproductive from the point of view of the global South, they have been highly successful from the point of view of the global North, because they have ensured that an increasing proportion of the debtor countries’ resources have gone to paying off foreign debts. Even by the mid-1980s, what was then called the Third World was paying out annually about three times as much in debt repayments as it received in aid from all developed-country governments and international aid agencies combined, and this continued in the 1990s. Ten years later, the developing countries are paying the rich nations $717 million a day in debt service; $12 billion annually flows north out of Africa alone.3 Over a decade ago, a former executive director of World Bank stated: “Not since the conquistadores plundered Latin America has the world experienced a flow in the direction we see today” (Miller 1991, 62). The world has never experienced anything like the current flow. Southern debt functions not only as a drain through which the resources of impoverished countries are siphoned abroad, but also as a shackle, because it keeps highly indebted countries trapped in a global trading system that they cannot abandon if they are to earn the foreign exchange necessary to service their debts. The present global trading system is regulated by neoliberal principles that have been especially harmful to poor women in both the global North and the global South.

Jagger 02’ (Allison M. Jagger, Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, A Feminist Critique of the Alleged Southern Debt, Hypatia 17.4 Fall 2002.) MN

the shift to cash crop agriculture has encouraged these countries to become permanently dependent on Northern machines and fertilizers have simultaneously created guaranteed markets for Northern manufactured products, technologies, and consumer goods. In a world where the terms of trade for raw materials and agricultural products have tended historically to worsen (with a few conspicuous, nonrenewable exceptions, such as oil), the South’s need for Northern products and capital has inevitably made the North richer and the South poorer. World Bank theory predicted that imposing these loan conditions would stimulate a virtuous economic circle of growth, rising employment, and rising investment. In fact, however, the growth rates of most debtor countries have been significantly reduced, living standards in many have declined, and some have become trapped in a vicious cycle of stagnation and decline caused by the interaction of low investment Although SAPs have been largely counterproductive from the point of view of the global South, they have been highly successful from the point of view of the global North, because they have ensured that an increasing proportion of the debtor countries’ resources have gone to paying off foreign debts Not since the conquistadores plundered Latin America has the world experienced a flow in the direction we see today” (Miller 1991, 62). The world has never experienced anything like the current flow. Southern debt functions not only as a drain through which the resources of impoverished countries are siphoned abroad, but also as a shackle, because it keeps highly indebted countries trapped in a global trading system that they cannot abandon if they are to earn the foreign exchange necessary to service their debts.

Attempts to reform countries in the past to pay off debt has led to the worsening of their conditions- the negs authors are biased from the perspective of the global North

Venezuela Debt Relief Affirmative - DDI 2013 SS.html5

Dartmouth DDI

Affirmatives

2013

Feliciano Guzmán, of the Worker’s Federation of Bolivar State (Fetrabolivar), says that “Under previous governments these productive businesses took five percent from their profits and paid into the CVG, to pay for the electricity, the roads, the sporting areas. And now nothing comes to CVG because the companies aren’t producing anything. Everything relies on subsidies from PDVSA, the state oil company.”¶ But PDVSA isn’t much more sustainable since its production is also dropping 3-4% per year and nearly a third of its earnings are spent buying gas, according to the May 6, 2013 issue of El Comercio. Yes, in one of the great ironies of “endogenous development” Venezuela is even forced to import millions of barrels of refined gas to keep up with internal consumption. Currently, Venezuela imports about one quarter of the gas it uses internally and it is estimated the price of gas in Venezuela (which now costs a few pennies per gallon) would have to be increased 900% just to cover the costs of production.

Ross 7/21 [Clifton, senior reporter for CounterPunch-- http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/07/19/building-a-critical-left-solidarity-movement/ -7/21/13—SR]

“Under previous governments these productive businesses took five percent from their profits and paid into the CVG, to pay for the electricity, the roads, the sporting areas Everything relies on subsidies from PDVSA, the state oil company PDVSA isn’t much more sustainable since its production is also dropping 3-4% per year and nearly a third of its earnings are spent buying gas Venezuela is even forced to import millions of barrels of refined gas to keep up with internal consumption. Venezuela imports about one quarter of the gas it uses internally and it is estimated the price of gas in Venezuela would have to be increased 900% just to cover the costs of production

PVDSA is unsustainable—Venezuela cant keep up

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2013

Venezuela’s economy went into recession in the first quarter of 2009, which lasted for five quarters, ¶ until the second quarter of 2010. International oil prices had dropped precipitously in the fourth ¶ quarter of 2008, falling by 50 percent (from $118 to $58 a barrel). Although at first glance the ¶ recession appears as though it was part of an inevitable “oil boom and bust,” this was not the case. ¶ Although most of the countries in the Western Hemisphere experienced recessions during the 2008-¶ 2009 world economic crisis and recession, many did not, and it was possible to mitigate the ¶ recession or even avoid it altogether with counter-cyclical macroeconomic policy. Venezuela was in ¶ a position to do so, since it had a low public debt (and most importantly, low foreign public debt) ¶ when oil prices began to fall, and could have borrowed and spent as much as necessary in order to ¶ keep the economy growing.

Weisbrot & Johnston 2k12 [Mark and Jake—senior analysts @ Center for Economic and Policy Research-- http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/venezuela-2012-09.pdf -September 2012-- SR]

Venezuela’s economy went into recession in the first quarter of 2009 International oil prices had dropped precipitously in the fourth quarter the recession appears as though it was part of an inevitable “oil boom and bust,” this was not the case. most of the countries in the Western Hemisphere experienced recessions many did not, and it was possible to mitigate the recession or even avoid it altogether Venezuela was in a position to do so since it had a low public debt when oil prices began to fall, and could have borrowed and spent as much as necessary in order to keep the economy growing.

Lower debt allows Venezuela to stabilize oil prices

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2013

Since the Venezuelan Executive Office has forced state-run oil company Pdvsa to fund a large number of government programs and projects while providing 95% of petrodollars to the Treasury, the petroleum firm faces significant liabilities because of poor fiscal policies. ¶ According to the annual report for fiscal year 2012 presented by the Ministry of Petroleum and Mining, Pdvsa's accounts payable to suppliers soared 41% last year.¶ The oil company's consolidated financial statements show that obligations with suppliers amounted to USD 14.66 billion, USD 4.23 billion above the amount recorded a year earlier (USD 10.41 billion).¶ Similarly, accounts receivable swelled 24% in the same period, climbing from USD 31.57 billion in 2011 to USD 38.99 billion in 2012. Receivables related to oil operations with Cuba and Petrocaribe member states are included. These operations exceed 200,000 oil barrels per day.¶ The financial report indicates that Pdvsa's assets in cash or cash equivalents fell by 51% in 2012, slipping from USD 8.61 billion in 2011 to USD 4.18 billion in 2012. This shows the various difficulties the Venezuelan oil company is facing to meet expenses and reduce accumulated debts to suppliers, which have been on for some years now.¶ Pdvsa's oil revenues in 2012 stood at USD 121.02 billion, down 3% (USD 3.72 billion) with respect to a year earlier. Meanwhile, overall earnings rebounded 2.81% and hit USD 4.71 billion.¶ Pdvsa's liabilities include debts to drilling services providers, which are involved in exploration and production activities. Such liabilities may translate into a drop in oil output. Early this week, US oil company Schlumberger, the world's largest oil service supplier, announced a reduction in its operations in Venezuela due to Pdvsa's accumulated debts.

Tovar 2k13 [Ernesto J, senior reporter for El Universal-- http://www.eluniversal.com/economia/130322/venezuelan-oil-firm-pdvsas-debt-to-suppliers-jumps-41-in-a-year -March 22, 2013-- SR]

the Venezuelan Executive Office has forced state-run oil company Pdvsa to fund a large number of government programs and projects the petroleum firm faces significant liabilities because of poor fiscal policies. , Pdvsa's accounts payable to suppliers soared 41% last year. The oil company's consolidated financial statements show that obligations with suppliers amounted to , USD 4.23 billion above the amount recorded a year earlier Receivables related to oil operations with Cuba and Petrocaribe member states are included. These operations exceed 200,000 oil barrels per day. Pdvsa's assets in cash or cash equivalents fell by 51% in 2012 This shows the various difficulties the Venezuelan oil company is facing to meet expenses and reduce accumulated debts to suppliers Pdvsa's oil revenues in 2012 stood at USD 121.02 billion, down 3% Pdvsa's liabilities include debts to drilling services providers, which are involved in exploration and production activities. Such liabilities may translate into a drop in oil output. the world's largest oil service supplier, announced a reduction in its operations in Venezuela due to Pdvsa's accumulated debts.

Accumulated debt is devastating the PVDSA—causing oil companies to pull out

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Affirmatives

2013

Venezuela still has a relatively low debt burden. The most common measure of debt is the ratio of ¶ debt to GDP.3 By this measure, the IMF reports Venezuela’s public debt for 2011 as 45.5 percent ¶ of GDP.4 Central government debt is just 25.1 percent of GDP; the IMF number includes other ¶ public entities, most importantly PDVSA, the national oil company. This is still a relatively low level ¶ of public debt – the European Union, for example, has a debt of about 82.5 percent of GDP. ¶ But for most purposes the interest burden of the debt is a more important measure, since countries ¶ that pay lower interest rates can obviously afford a bigger debt stock.5¶ It is also important to ¶ distinguish between external and internal debt. Debt owed in domestic currency can always be paid; ¶ but the same is not true for foreign debt.¶ Also, Venezuela’s exports are about 95 percent oil, and the oil sector is publicly owned. So the ¶ Venezuelan government receives this income in dollars. Given this situation, it is best to look at the ¶ external and domestic debt separately, and measure the burden of each debt by the appropriate ¶ yardstick.

Weisbrot & Johnston 2k12 [Mark and Jake—senior analysts @ Center for Economic and Policy Research-- http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/venezuela-2012-09.pdf -September 2012-- SR]

Venezuela’s public debt for 2011 as 45.5 percent of GDP.4 the IMF number includes other public entities, most importantly PDVSA most purposes the interest burden of the debt is a more important measure, since countries that pay lower interest rates can obviously afford a bigger debt stock Debt owed in domestic currency can always be paid; but the same is not true for foreign debt. Venezuela’s exports are about 95 percent oil, and the oil sector is publicly owned. it is best to look at the external and domestic debt separately, and measure the burden of each debt by the appropriate yardstick

Your defense doesn’t apply—domestic debt is distinct from foreign debt

Venezuela Debt Relief Affirmative - DDI 2013 SS.html5

Dartmouth DDI

Affirmatives

2013

For 2011, interest payments on the central government external debt are 3.4 percent of export ¶ earnings; they are projected to rise to 4.1 percent by 2012, decreasing thereafter. This is not a large ¶ percentage of public sector export earnings going to debt service, so there is no obvious problem ¶ regarding debt sustainability for the external debt. If the government decides to increase its ¶ spending, and borrows to do so, it will borrow mostly domestically, and so should not need to add much to the foreign public debt. Also, these projections are based on the assumption that revenues ¶ are the same as in 2011, so they are conservative; most likely revenues will increase and the interest ¶ burden will be lower. ¶ The state oil company also borrows on its own, and its debt is almost all external; its interest ¶ payments in 2011 were 1.5 percent of export earnings, and are projected to peak at 3.1 percent in ¶ 2012.

Weisbrot & Johnston 2k12 [Mark and Jake—senior analysts @ Center for Economic and Policy Research-- http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/venezuela-2012-09.pdf -September 2012-- SR]

interest payments on the central government external debt are 3.4 percent of export earnings; they are projected to rise to 4.1 percent by 2012 these projections are based on the assumption that revenues are the same as in 2011, so they are conservative; most likely revenues will increase and the interest burden will be lower The state oil company also borrows on its own, and its debt is almost all external

PVDSA’s debt is external and foreign

Venezuela Debt Relief Affirmative - DDI 2013 SS.html5

Dartmouth DDI

Affirmatives

2013

For most of the past 13 years, much of the discussion of Venezuela’s economy has either assumed ¶ or concluded that it was headed for some type of collapse. During the first four years of the Chavez ¶ administration, when the government did not control the national oil company (PDVSA), there was ¶ indeed a great deal of economic instability. This culminated in the military coup of April 2002, and ¶ then an economically crippling oil strike (December 2002-February 2003). The oil strike caused an ¶ extremely severe recession, with a loss of 29 percent of GDP. However, even after the strike was ¶ over, analysts predicted a dire future and a slow, difficult recovery. IMF forecasts repeatedly ¶ underestimated GDP growth by a gigantic 10.6, 6.8, and 5.8 percentage points for the years 2004-¶ 2006.¶ 6¶ Instead, the recovery was very rapid and the economy grew at a record pace over the next ¶ five years, with real GDP nearly doubling from the end of the oil strike (first quarter 2003) through ¶ the fourth quarter of 2008.

Weisbrot & Johnston 2k12 [Mark and Jake—senior analysts @ Center for Economic and Policy Research-- http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/venezuela-2012-09.pdf -September 2012-- SR]

During the first four years of the Chavez administration, when the government did not control PDVSA there was indeed a great deal of economic instability. This culminated in the military coup then an economically crippling oil strike The oil strike caused an extremely severe recession, with a loss of 29 percent of GDP. analysts predicted a dire future and a slow, difficult recovery

Empirics prove PVDSA k2 Venezuelan stability

Venezuela Debt Relief Affirmative - DDI 2013 SS.html5

Dartmouth DDI

Affirmatives

2013

CARACAS, March 2 (Reuters) - The increasingly heavy debts of Venezuela's state oil company PDVSA are hindering the OPEC nation's efforts to meet ambitious goals to boost its crude production this year.¶ President Hugo Chavez's government aims to increase output to 3.5 million barrels per day (bpd) in 2012, from 3 million bpd last year. It would be the biggest annual rise during the socialist leader's 13 years in power.¶ Much of the new production is slated to come from the vast Orinoco belt. But several executives at companies working with PDVSA said delays by PDVSA in paying its partners were creating severe bottle-necks.

Parranga 2k12 [Marianna, senior reporter @ Reuters-- http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/03/02/venezuela-oil-pdvsa-idUKL2E8E19OZ20120302 -March 2, 2012-- SR]

The increasingly heavy debts of PDVSA are hindering the OPEC nation's efforts Much of the new production is slated to come from the vast Orinoco belt. But several executives at companies working with PDVSA said delays by PDVSA in paying its partners were creating severe bottle-necks.

Venezuelan debt is dragging OPEC down

Venezuela Debt Relief Affirmative - DDI 2013 SS.html5

Dartmouth DDI

Affirmatives

2013

The death of Hugo Chavez presents an opportunity for the new Venezuelan leadership to tone down the rhetoric of anti-Americanism and put our bilateral relations on a pragmatic basis.¶ The U.S. remains the principal purchaser of Venezuelan oil which is refined in Gulf Coast refineries for later export to China and other markets. Food and pharmaceutical products, cosmetics, spare parts and electrical equipment are bought from the U.S. although payment for these goods is delayed and consumers must wait 4 to 5 months for the new inventory to arrive at Venezuelan ports.¶ Venezuela is in the midst of an economic crisis with shortages of U.S. dollars, a devaluation of 32 percent and the prospect of searing inflation. Furthermore, Venezuela needs foreign direct investment, technical expertise and spare parts from the U.S. ¶ Rather than demonizing Washington, an opportunity exists for Caracas to reframe the relationship to a realistic mode.

Negroponte 2k13 [Diana Villiers, senior analyst @ Brookings Institute-- http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/up-front/posts/2013/03/05-chavez-venezuela-negroponte --3/5/2013-- SR]

The death of Hugo Chavez presents an opportunity for the new Venezuelan leadership to tone down the rhetoric of anti-Americanism and put our bilateral relations on a pragmatic basis. The U.S. remains the principal purchaser of Venezuelan oil Food and pharmaceutical products, cosmetics, spare parts and electrical equipment are bought from the U.S Venezuela is in the midst of an economic crisis with shortages of U.S. dollars a devaluation of 32 percent and the prospect of searing inflation Venezuela needs foreign direct investment from the U.S. , an opportunity exists for Caracas to reframe the relationship

US is the critical actor—direct investments are key

Venezuela Debt Relief Affirmative - DDI 2013 SS.html5

Dartmouth DDI

Affirmatives

2013

“The oil sector is in deep trouble in Venezuela – production is down and the economic situation is deteriorating,” explained Shifter. “They know they need foreign investment to increase production, and this is in part what has motivated Maduro to reach out.”¶ If its economy continues to falter, Venezuela may be further tempted to embrace the United States, which has the largest, most sophisticated fossil fuel industry in the world. Kerry’s recent words suggest that the administration of President Barack Obama would be waiting with open arms.¶ “Venezuela cannot confront its economic crisis and the United States at the same time,” Diana Villiers Negroponte, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, a Washington think tank, told IPS, “and we are a pragmatic country which will deal with Maduro if it is in our interests.”¶ Indeed, Negroponte said she was “optimistic” about the possibility of rapprochement between the two countries within the next six months. She notes a “troika” of issues on which the United States is looking for Venezuelan cooperation: counter-terrorism, counter-narcotics and assistance in ridding Colombia of its FARC rebels.¶ Nonetheless, major actions remain to be taken if normalisation is to even begin, such as the exchange of ambassadors and official U.S. recognition of the Maduro government. Shifter (who regards the Kerry-Jaua meeting as “a small step”) was not optimistic that these larger requirements will be completed in the short term.¶ “I don’t think Washington is going to push hard to send an ambassador to Caracas,” he said. “It will probably take more time to observe the new government and see where it is going.”

Metzker 2k13 [Jared, senior reporter for IPS News-- http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/06/analysts-say-oil-could-help-mend-u-s-venezuela-relations/ --6/17/13]

The oil sector is in deep trouble in Venezuela Рproduction is down and the economic situation is deteriorating They know they need foreign investment to increase production, and this is in part what has motivated Maduro to reach out.Ӧ If its economy continues to falter, Venezuela may be further tempted to embrace the United States, which has the largest, most sophisticated fossil fuel industry in the world Venezuela cannot confront its economic crisis and the United States at the same time

US is key—largest and most sophisticated

Venezuela Debt Relief Affirmative - DDI 2013 SS.html5

Dartmouth DDI

Affirmatives

2013

Among oil executives and analysts, there was cautious optimism that Mr. Chávez’s death could soften the hostility his government had toward foreign investment in exploration and refining. “It makes sense that Maduro will be more pragmatic to get the country going,” said Jorge R. Piñon, former president of Amoco Oil Latin America. He said he had talked with several oil executives and come away surprised by their optimism.¶ “Industry executives believe that there is a high probability that a Maduro administration will be a bit more realistic on what is needed to increase the country’s oil production,” Mr. Piñon added, “and change the investment model to attract more foreign investment.”

Neuman & Thompson ‘13 ["A Leader Cries, 'I Am Chavez', as U.S. Seeks Policy Clues", March 6, William and Ginger, www.nytimes.com/2013/03/07/world/americas/a-leaders-cry-in-venezuela-i-am-chavez.html?pagewanted=all --3/7/13—SR]

there was cautious optimism that Mr. Chávez’s death could soften the hostility his government had toward foreign investment in exploration and refining Maduro will be more pragmatic to get the country going,” said Jorge R. Piñon, former president of Amoco Oil Latin America Industry executives believe that there is a high probability that a Maduro administration will be realistic on the country’s oil production and change the investment model to attract more foreign investment.”

Maduro will cooperate change the business model—oil is a critical issue

Venezuela Debt Relief Affirmative - DDI 2013 SS.html5

Dartmouth DDI

Affirmatives

2013