Tournament: Blake | Round: 1 | Opponent: Snyder, Kaija | Judge: West Des Moines Valley LS
The gratuitous violence of Black and Indigenous women demands the mutilation of nonhuman flesh to create intelligibility for the conquistador human within modernity. King:
Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2019, (HTE)
The captive body forms the structure of modernity. It is stripped from the flesh, formulating the symbolic and material creation of the human. Their metaphysics assumes a teleological relationship to the political which misunderstands the violence of humanism. Spillers:
Spillers 87, Hortense Spiller, Professor of English at Vanderbilt University, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics, 1987, https://people.ucsc.edu/~nmitchel/hortense_spillers_-_mamas_baby_papas_maybe.pdf, 67-68.
The nation state is a weapon of mass destruction. The affirmative’s emphasis on an impending apocalypse as the major danger to human life is a direct effacement of the everyday violence of institutionalized racism – the fiction of uniqueness for their extinction impact can only be established through a genocidal forgetting of the historical world-ending violence of white supremacy. Omolade:
1989, Barbara Omolade is a historian of black women for the past twenty years and an organizer in both the women’s and civil rights/black power movements, “We Speak for the Planet” in “Rocking the ship of state : toward a feminist peace politics”, pp. 172-176
Their fantasies of extinction reflect settlers’ psychological investment in imagining the end of the world – fear of extinction is a settler paradox where settler colonialism continues to imagine its end to sustain itself through constant interventions – this symbolically redeems the settler and preserves their value at the expense of indigenous genocide. The Aff never happens. There is no extinction. It is an allusion for self-preservation. Dalley:
Hamish Dalley (2016): The deaths of settler colonialism: extinction as a metaphor of decolonization in contemporary settler literature, Settler Colonial Studies, DOI: 10.1080/2201473X.2016.1238160