Three important notes about this file

AT: Libidinal Economy

Their claims to a libidinal economy are a sham. Historicizing slavery and capitalism through the lens of social death effaces the agency and lived experiences of the slave.

Brown 2009 – professor of history and of African and African American Studies specializing in Atlantic Slavery (Vincent, “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,” http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/documents/brown-socialdeath.pdf)

Specters of the Atlantic is a compellingly sophisticated study of the relation between the epistemologies underwriting both modern slavery and modern capitalism, but the book’s discussion of the politics of anti-slavery is fundamentally incomplete. While Baucom brilliantly traces the development of “melancholy realism” as an oppositional discourse that ran counter to the logic of slavery and finance capital, he has very little to say about the enslaved themselves. Social death, so well suited to the tragic perspective, stands in for the experience of enslavement. While this heightens the reader’s sense of the way Atlantic slavery haunts the present, Baucom largely fails to acknowledge that the enslaved performed melancholy acts of accounting not unlike those that he shows to be a fundamental component of abolitionist and human rights discourses, or that those acts could be a basic element of slaves’ oppositional activities. In many ways, the effectiveness of his text depends upon the silence of slaves—it is easier to describe the continuity of structures of power when one downplays countervailing forces such as the political activity of the weak. So Baucom’s deep insights into the structural features of Atlantic slave trading and its afterlife come with a cost. Without engagement with the politics of the enslaved, slavery’s history serves as an effective charge leveled against modernity and capitalism, but not as an uneven and evolving process of human interaction, and certainly not as a locus of conflict in which the enslaved sometimes won small but important victories.11

adheres to patterson

Wilderson adheres to Patterson

Bruker 2011 – Temple University (Malia, Review: RED, WHITE & BLACK: CINEMA AND THE STRUCTURE OF U.S. ANTAGONISMS, Journal of Film & Video; Winter2011, Vol. 63 Issue 4, p66-69)

Wilderson aligns himself with Afro-pessimists such as Hortense Spillers, Ronald Judy, David Marriott, Saidiya Hartman, Orlando Patterson, and Jared Sexton, whom he references throughout the book. In the lengthy and dense chapter “The Narcissistic Slave,” Wilderson builds heavily on the work of Franz Fanon to argue against the possibility of Lacan and Lacanian film theory to apply to black people. “Whereas Lacan was aware of how language ‘precedes and exceeds us,’ he did not have Fanon’s awareness of how violence also precedes and exceeds Blacks” (76). Wilderson sees Lacan’s process of full speech for whites as contingent on the black Other as a frame of reference, “which remonumentalizes the (White) ego” and “is an accomplice to social stability, despite its claims to the contrary” (75).

Patterson’s work is the foundation of the theory

Brown 2009 – professor of history and of African and African American Studies specializing in Atlantic Slavery (Vincent, “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,” http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/documents/brown-socialdeath.pdf)

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.6 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.7 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.

***TOPICAL ACCESS TO DISCUSSING RACE***

Buses

Modern bus system key to race tolerance and integration

Mann 96- director of the Labor/Community Strategy Center, former delegate to the U.N. World Conference Against Racism (Eric, “A New Vision for Urban Transportation,” Strategy Center Publications, Los Angeles//MGD)

Los Angeles could have a first-class public mass transit system, serving low-income people, wellpaid working people and even the upper middle class, if they are willing, that is, to mingle with “the masses.” It could serve Latinos, African Americans, Asian/Pacific Islanders, Native Americans and whites, women and men, inner city and suburbs, students, the elderly, and the disabled. In theory, this first class mass transit system could dramatically reduce auto use, and reduce noxious and lethal emissions from autos, thereby improving the public health. It could bring low-income workers to their jobs, help out-of-work workers look for jobs before President Clinton’s “five year and starve” rule takes effect, serve night-shift janitors and day-shift professionals. By dramatically reducing auto use, it could generate more pedestrian centers, bringing the races together through a transportation system that is more social and far more rich culturally than the private automobile. By dramatically reducing fares, increasing service, and giving high-speed buses the right-of-way, it could increase daily mass transit use—some estimate doubling the present level of bus riders from 350,000 to 700,000 per day over a decade of consistent improvement. A first-class bus system that comes on-time and with such regularity that you don’t need to call the MTA for a schedule would allow the elderly to break out of their home-prison of fear and aloneness, allow disabled residents in wheelchairs rapid and courteous service, permit high school students from the inner city to travel to good schools around the county in a reasonable amount of time, and allow working men and women to take their children to childcare, visit their sick relatives, and take the entire family to a park or beach without a care or a car. In theory this new vision of urban transportation could cure as many ills as penicillin, jogging, and a low-fat, high-fiber diet combined—providing green jobs to produce electric buses in job-starved areas, creating new bus shelters and bus depots in blighted communities, and allowing an exhausted working class to consider going to parks, museums, and free concerts miles away. Moreover, with an immediate moratorium on rail funding and either a movement or a court-imposed policy for massive funding of the bus system, the following key demands of the Billions for Buses plan would make this vision come to life.