Three important notes about this file

Nihilism Turn/Ahistorical

They assume that anti-black animus arises from nothingness but its caught up in a broader web of historical power relationships like Islamophobia and nativism

Charoenying 8 [Timothy, citing Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Prof of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley, Islamophobia & Anti-Blackness: A Genealogical Approach, http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/islamophobia-anti-blackness-genealogical-approach //liam]
The year 1492 marked a major turning point in the trajectory of Western Civilization. Elementary age children are taught this as the year Columbus famously crossed the Atlantic. An equally significant event that year, was the Spanish conquest of al-Andalus–a Moorish province on the southern Iberian peninsula established eight centuries earlier–and more importantly, the last major Muslim stronghold on the European continent. Critical race scholars have argued that these two events would not only shift the geopolitical balance of power from the Orient to the Occident, but fundamentally alter conceptions about religious and racial identity.¶ According to Nelson Maldonado-Torres, of the University of California, Berkeley, the expulsion of the Moors from continental Europe marked a transition from an age of imperial relations between Christian and Muslim empires, to an age of European colonial expansion throughout the known world. The “discovery” of “godless” natives in the Americas would also inspire the great debates between Las Casas and Sepúlveda in 1550 on the nature of the human soul. Such a geopolitical and philosophical shift, Maldonado-Torres argues, would lead to a Eurocentric, re-categorization of humanity based upon religous—and ultimately racial—differences. Maldonado-Torres has proposed that anti-black racism is not simply an extension of some historical bias against blacks, but rather, is an amalgam of old-world Islamophobia linked to the history of the Iberian peninsula, and to the notion of souless beings embodied in popular conceptions about the indigenous natives of the Americas.¶ These beliefs would contribute to an ideological basis for, and justification of, colonial conquests in the name of cultural and religious conversion, as well as pave the way for the enslavement and human trafficking of sub-Saharan Africans.

Their nihilism turns the case – greatest comparative threat

Miah quoting West in 94 [Malik Miah, Cornel West's Race Matters, May-June, http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/3079 //liam]

In the chapter, “Nihilism in Black America,” West observes “The liberal/conservative discussion conceals the most basic issue now facing Black America: the nihilistic threat to its very existence. This threat is not simply a matter of relative economic deprivation and political powerlessness -- though economic well-being and political clout are requisites for meaningful Black progress. It is primarily a question of speaking to the profound sense of psychological depression, personal worthlessness, and social despair so widespread in Black America.” (12-13)¶ “Nihilism,” he continues, “is to be understood here not as a philosophic doctrine ... it is, far more, the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaningless, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness.” (14)¶ “Nihilism is not new in Black America. . . . In fact,” West explains,”the major enemy of Black survival in America has been and is neither oppression nor exploitation but rather the nihilistic Threat -- that is, loss of hope and absence of meaning. For as long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression stays alive. The self-fulfilling prophecy of the nihilistic threat is that without hope there can be no future, that without meaning there can be no struggle.” (14-15)

Social Death/ Determinism Turn

The affirmative’s choice to frame the nature of oppression through the rhetorical and ideological frame of “social death” entrenches pessimism and despair

Brown 09 [Vincent Brown is Professor of History and of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW, DECEMBER 2009 http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/documents/brown-socialdeath.pdf //liam]

Slavery and Social Death was widely reviewed and lavishly praised for its erudition and conceptual rigor. As a result of its success, social death has become a handy general definition of slavery, for many historians and non-historians alike. But it is often forgotten that the concept of social death is a distillation from Patterson’s breathtaking survey—a theoretical abstraction that is meant not to describe the lived experiences of the enslaved so much as to reduce them to a least common denominator that could reveal the essence of slavery in an ideal-type slave, shorn of meaningful heritage. As a concept, it is what Frederick Cooper has called an “agentless abstraction” that provides a neat cultural logic but ultimately does little to illuminate the social and political experience of enslavement and the struggles that produce historic transformations. Indeed, it is difficult to use such a distillation to explain the actual behavior of slaves, and yet in much of the scholarship that followed in the wake of Slavery and Social Death, Patterson’s abstract distillates have been used to explain the existential condition of the enslaved. Having emerged from the discipline of sociology, “social death” fit comfortably within a scholarly tradition that had generally been more alert to deviations in patterns of black life from prevailing social norms than to the worldviews, strategies, and social tactics of people in black communities. Together with Patterson’s work on the distortions wrought by slavery on black families, “social death” reflected sociology’s abiding concern with “social pathology”; the “pathological condition” of twentieth-century black life could be seen as an outcome of the damage that black people had suffered during slavery.University of Chicago professor Robert Park, the grand-pe`re of the social pathologists, set the terms in 1919: “the Negro, when he landed in the United States, left behind almost everything but his dark complexion and his tropical temperament.” 8 Patterson’s distillation also conformed to the nomothetic imperative of social science, which has traditionally aimed to discover universal laws of operation that would be true regardless of time and place, making the synchronic study of social phenomena more tempting than more descriptive studies of historical transformation. Slavery and Social Death took shape during a period when largely synchronic studies of antebellum slavery in the United States dominated the scholarship on human bondage, and Patterson’s expansive view was meant to situate U.S. slavery in a broad context rather than to discuss changes as the institution developed through time. Thus one might see “social death” as an obsolete product of its time and tradition, an academic artifact with limited purchase for contemporary scholarship, were it not for the concept’s reemergence in some important new studies of slavery. 9 WIDELY ACKNOWLEDGED AS AMONG themost onerous of social institutions, slavery has much to tell us about the way human beings react to oppression. At the same time, the extreme nature of the institution naturally encourages a pessimistic view of the capacity for collective agency among subjugated people. As a result, trends in the study of slavery, as with the study of dominancemore generally, often divide between works that emphasize the overwhelming power of the institution and scholarship that focuses on the resistant efforts of the enslaved. In turn, this division frames a problem in the general understanding of political life, especially for the descendants of the powerless. It might even be said that these kinds of studies form different and opposing genres—hopeful stories of heroic subalterns versus anatomies of doom—that compete for ascendance. In recent years, if the invocation of Patterson’s “social death” is any indication, the pendulum seems to have swung decidedly toward despair.
Their methodology is flawed—Their focus on social death disempowers social agency and pushes us away from political activism. We should recognize that we live in a world where culture creates opportunities for us to find empowerment and we should reject the notion that oppression is form of social death

Brandom 10 [Eric Brandom Brown v Agamben V. Brown, 'Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery', The American Historical Review, 114, (2009), pp 1231-1249. http://ebrandom.blogspot.com/2009/12/brown-v-agamben.html //liam]

This essay is most straightforwardly a corrective to what Brown sees as the misuse (overuse) of Orlando Patterson’s categorical definition of slavery as social death. According to Brown, historians have often taken what Patterson meant as an ideal type definition to be a description of reality itself. Historians have long rejected, however, the basic result of such a definition: that it would strip slaves of agency. Manifestly, historians have pointed out, slaves had agency. One need look no further than the continuous rebellions and occasional revolutions to emerge from new world slavery to see this. Brown’s real goal, though, is deeper than this. In step with his historical work in The Reaper’s Garden, Brown wants to retell the story of slavery from the perspective of what we might call the micro-politics, or cultural politics, of everyday life. Brown argues that what he calls mortuary politics, conflict and negotiation over death, burial, and associated rituals, are of the greatest importance. One might make this argument in many contexts, but Caribbean slavery is a privileged field. Increasingly, it the worldview forged in the 18th century experience of slavery and revolution has come to be recognized as central to modernity as such (European, Atlantic, or even if you like, Capitalist). Mortuary politics is found to be central to the world of slavery, to the movement of the Haitian Revolution, and thus to modernity. One effect of Brown’s argument, or rather one consequence of the argument that he wants to make, is a firm and empirically-oriented rejection of Giorgio Agamben. Brown deals with this in a few paragraphs explaining the limits of an Agambenian perspective such as that taken in Ian Baucom’s Specters of the Atlantic. Agamben’s notion of bare life, for Brown, is piggybacked into the historical study of slavery as a sort of compliment to and intensification of Pattersonian social death. Brown doesn’t exactly want to re-open old debates about agency (vs structure!), but he does want to argue that it is plainly wrong to see Caribbean slaves as without culture, in the sense of without resources or community. He cites William Sewell’s recent definition of culture, commenting, “practices of meaning are better seen as tools to be used than as possessions to be lost.” There are several somewhat separable issues here. First, there is the methodological question of how one should think about culture and agency. In this, I simply agree with Brown. I prefer to treat culture (or, qua intellectual historian, unit ideas) as a bundle of tools to be manipulated—tools that empower, but also limit, channel, and react upon, those that wield them. Then there is the more empirical question of the admissibility and utility of the notion of ‘social death’ in the study of slave systems, say specifically in the Caribbean. Not having read all the relevant texts, I defer with enthusiasm to Brown. What I have read leads me to believe that he is entirely correct.
Their methodology of constructing any form of barrier in life as “social death” precludes liberation and makes greater manipulation and oppression inevitable

Muhwati 05 [Itai Muhwati Department of African Languages and Literature, University of Zimbabwe http://ir.uz.ac.zw:8080/jspui/bitstream/10646/515/1/Muhwati-Mass-Neurosis.pdf //liam]

The physical wreckage and spiritual paralysis that is by definition an expression of this image, leads to an agonising realisation that, in life’s vicissitudes, and life’s race of race survival, African people remain undeveloped and fledgling stutters. The images of characters in these novels whose titles are vapid project Africans as victims of collective inertia, wallowing in cultural and historical amnesia and disintegrating in irretrievable mentacide. As a result, in terms of agency and mobility, the African race remains glued on the starting line, quite overwhelmed by the seemingly insurmountable hurdles in the race of life. Through the choice of titles, most of the writers seem to have adopted a modality that inordinately projects social death and a host of other social sicknesses as new forms of social identity in the contemporary dispensation. While their absolutisation of mass neurosis, closure and entrapment might be said to be a reflection of the state of the nation in the post independence period, it is also estimable that such images of social sickness, paralysis and mass neurosis can be manipulated by Africa’s anthropological detractors in their justification of a static and back pedalling African race, particularly along the evolutionary spectrum, which is presented as a universal standard of valuation. The paper also puts forth argument that, the adoption of an axiological paradigm that legitimises closure and race entrapment nullifies any prospects towards racial salvation. It is an act of defining the African race as doomed. Such a definition which trivialises the African existential trajectory pays homage to the subversive labels that Europe has generously donated to Africa. Such labels include Third World; Underdeveloped; Dark Continent; Poor majority, cultural other and many more. These are designations that bespeak helplessness and mass neurosis.
The rhetorical frame they choose in framing life as death makes disempowerment inevitable and risks extinction

Muhwati 05 [Itai Muhwati Department of African Languages and Literature, University of Zimbabwe http://ir.uz.ac.zw:8080/jspui/bitstream/10646/515/1/Muhwati-Mass-Neurosis.pdf //liam]

As natural speakers of African languages, there is need for African people to be careful of not using the natural gift that language is to disempower themselves. When language is recklessly used, it can become one of the subtle forms of ideological and pedagogical disempowerment. Language constitutes one of the oldest and effective forms of technology that humanity has always deployed for the purposes of transcendence. For that reason, the language or discourse that a people adopt and adapt can enhance or 5 negate survival. Henry Paget (1997: 15) explores the African possibilities of visualising themselves as finite sites of agency. He advises us that: It is the fate of this capacity for agency that is crucial for our attitudes toward existence. Through its sense of agency, an individual or group makes an estimate of its chances for successful self-assertion or strategic intervention vis-à-vis its environment. Success or failure in such undertakings are [sic] important determinants of our attitudes.
Their methodology of viewing life experiences as death destroys agency and makes death a permanent condition of life. If you think that every barrier you confront in life murders your spirit than life becomes constant death. If you define someone running topicality against you as an act of genocide than every barrier you confront in life becomes the experience of death.

Several examples:

1. My teacher made me write a paper on a topic she chose—spirit death

2. I got a bad grade in class---spirit death

3. I lost a debate round—spirit death.

This is supported:

Muhwati 05 [Itai Muhwati Department of African Languages and Literature, University of Zimbabwe http://ir.uz.ac.zw:8080/jspui/bitstream/10646/515/1/Muhwati-Mass-Neurosis.pdf //liam]

Stories in Masango Mavi as well the general social picture in Mapenzi reflect an annihilatory vision. Such a vision centralises closure and entrapment. The story titled “Mashiriapungana” (complex/ difficult situation) in Masango Mavi presents a people whose future is frighteningly bleak. The characters are so overcome with death to the extent of losing belief in the project of life. A closer examination on their condition shows that they no longer die once but several times because they have adopted a nihilist vision. However, such a social vision is dangerous in that it subverts agency and participation while entrenching surrender and defeatist attitudes as social ideals. James Baldwin (1963:13) comments on the ramifications of embodying such a vision. He observes in the letter to his brother that, “…he… [died] before he died because he really believed what…people said about him.” Death is so prevalent in this story. The author tells us that: Vanhu vapabasa pake vaiva vashoma asi painge pagara pachingobatanwa maoko zuva nezuva. Dzimwe nguva aishaya kuti paizopera makore gumi kambani yainge ichiri kushandirwa naiye neshamwari dzake here… (14). Fellow workers were very few yet it had become a norm to exchange condolences almost every day. At times he was not sure if the same company would still have the same workers in ten years time. The integrity of a nation revolves around the physical presence of its people. Such physical presence depends on a host of other factors which include the emotional, psychological and spiritual health of a people. When death and other forces of degeneration tend to out manoeuvre life and forces of regeneration, existence becomes a nullity. Some of the characters even prepare for their death in advance because life is said to have become very short. Chiwome caricatures such people and presents them as neurotics. However, the neurosis is so prevalent to the extent that chances of survival for the race are questionable. This is the kind of mass neurosis that leads to closure and entrapment. When the race loses faith in both the present and the future, individual and group development becomes a mirage.