K - Orientalism

Orientalism/Alien Capital K
Solomon Park(class of 2019)
John Lubiantesky (class of 2020)
Barstow PW & Barstow LM

1NC
Asian immigration is contingent on their status as excess labor that has become
a battleground where the West proxies and homogenizes the East in economic,
imperialistic, and racial ventures
Lowe 98 Lisa Lowe is Distinguished Professor of English and Humanities,[1] a faculty member
of the Consortium of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora,[2] and Director of the Center
for the Humanities at Tufts University.[3] Prior to joining Tufts in 2012, she taught at Yale
Universityand at the University of California, San Diego.[4] From 1998 to 2001, she served as the
chair of the Literature Department at UC San Diego. She began as a scholar of comparative
literature, and her work has focused on literatures and cultures of encounter that emerge from
histories of colonialism, immigration, and globalization. She is known especially for her work
on French and British colonialisms and postcolonial literature, Asian immigration and Asian
American studies, race and empire, and comparative global humanities. The Power of Culture 2-
3 SP
“Asia” has always been a complex site upon which the manifold anxieties of the United States
nation-state have been figured: such anxieties have both figured Asian countries as exotic,
barbaric, and alie
n, and Asian laborers immigrating to the United States from the nineteenth century onward as
a “yellow peril” threatening to displace White European immigrants. 6 Orientalist racializations of
Asians as physically and intellectually different from “Whites” predominated especially in periods in which
a domestic crisis of capital was coupled with nativist anti-Asian backlash and intersected significantly with
immigration exclusion acts and laws against naturalization of Chinese in 1882, Asian Indians in 1917,
Japanese and Koreans in 1924, and Filipinos in 1934. 7 Exclusionist rhetoric ranged from nativist
agitation which claimed that “servile coolie” Chinese labor undercut “free white” labor, to declarations
about the racial unassimilability of the Japanese, to arguments that Asian social organization
threatened the integrity of [End Page 8] American political institutions. 8 During the crises of national
identity that occurred in periods of United States war in Asia — with the Philippines (1898–1910), against
Japan (1941–45), in Korea (1950–53), and in Viet Nam (1955–75) — American orientalism displaced
United States expansionist interests in Asia onto racialized figurations of Asian workers within
the national space. Although predictions of Asian productivity supplanting European economic
dominance have gripped the European and American imaginations since the nineteenth century,
in the period from World War II onward, “Asia” has emerged as a particularly complicated
“double-front” of threat and encroachment for the United States. On the one hand, Asian
states have become prominent as external rivals in overseas imperial war and in global
economy, and on the other, Asian immigrants are still a necessary, racialized labor force
within the domestic national economy. Immigration exclusion acts and naturalization laws
have thus been not only a means of regulating the terms of the citizen and the nation-state,
but also an intersection of the legal and political terms with an orientalist discourse that
defined Asians as culturally and racially “other” in times when the United States was militarily
and economically at war with Asia. Historically and materially, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Asian
Indian, and Filipino immigrants have played crucial roles in the building and the sustaining of
America; at certain times, these immigrants have been fundamental to the construction of the
nation as a simulacrum of inclusiveness. Yet the project of imagining the nation as
homogeneous requires the orientalist construction of cultures and geographies from which
Asian immigrants come as fundamentally “foreign” origins antipathetic to the modern
American society that “discovers,” “welcomes,” and “domesticates” them. A national memory
haunts the conception of the Asian American, persisting beyond the repeal of actual laws
prohibiting Asians from citizenship from 1943 to 1952 and sustained by the wars in Asia, in
which the Asian is always seen as an immigrant, as the “foreigner-within,” even when born in
the United States and the descendant of generations born here before. 9 It is this premise that
Barroga’s play highlights through the veterans’ objection that Maya Lin’s monument cannot
represent the American nation. The [End Page 9] American soldier, who has in every way
submitted to the nation, is the quintessential citizen and therefore the ideal representative of
the nation, yet the American of Asian descent remains the symbolic “alien,” the metonym for
Asia, who by definition cannot be imagined as sharing in America. 10 Narratives of immigrant
inclusion — stories of the Asian immigrant’s journey from foreign strangeness to assimilation
and citizenship — may in turn attempt to produce cultural integration and its symbolization on
the national political terrain. Yet these same narratives are driven by the repetition and return
of episodes in which the Asian American, even as a citizen, continues to be located outside the
cultural and racial boundaries of the nation. Rather than attesting to the absorption of cultural
difference into the universality of the national political sphere as the “model minority” stereotype would
dictate, the Asian immigrant — at odds with the cultural, racial, and linguistic form of the nation —
emerges in a site that defers and displaces the temporality of assimilation. 11 This distance from the
national culture constitutes Asian American culture as an alternative formation that produces cultural
expressions materially and aesthetically at odds with the resolution of the citizen in the nation. Rather
than expressing a “failed” integration of Asians into the American cultural sphere, this distance preserves
Asian American culture as an alternative site where the palimpsest of lost memories is reinvented,
histories are fractured and retraced, and the unlike varieties of silence emerge into
articulacy. 12 Hence, Asian American culture emerges out of the contradictions of Asian
immigration, which in the last century and a half of Asian entry into the United States have
placed Asians “within” the United States nation-state, its workplaces, and its markets, yet
linguistically, culturally, and racially marked Asians as “foreign” and “outside” the national
polity. 13 Under such contradictions, late nineteenth-century Chinese immigrants labored in
mining, agriculture, and railroad construction but were excluded from citizenship and political
participation in the state. 14 The contradiction of immigration and citizenship took a different
but consistently resonant form during World War II, when United States-born Japanese
Americans were nominally recognized as citizens and hence recruited into the United States
military, yet were dispossessed [End Page 10] of freedoms and properties explicitly granted to
citizens, officially condemned as “racial enemies,” and interned in camps throughout the
western United States. 15 Philippine immigration after the period of United States
colonization animates yet another kind of contradiction. For Filipino immigrants, modes of
capitalist incorporation and acculturation into American life begin not at the moment of
immigration, but rather in the “homeland” already deeply affected by United States influences
and modes of social organization.
Orientalism translates into domestic spatial management within ‘ethnic

enclaves’ – imposing ontological positionality into geopolitical location where
homogeneity marked Asianness as an unassimilable other in the race making of
the US.
Liu ’17 (Liu, Wen, "Cruising Borders, Unsettling Identities: Toward a Queer Diasporic Asian
America" (2017). CUNY Academic Works. http://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/2017) klmd
The second-generation immigrant children’s conflict of assimilation was well documented in
Lee’s paper on the aspects of education, language, diet, values, and social affiliations with the
majority society. While these second generation immigrants’ obstacles of acculturation and
biculturalism remain to be one of the major psychological concerns in the present, these issues
were largely considered as spatial, that is, caused by the physical segregation of racialized
spaces, instead of merely cultural. Lee observed: “Inadequate housing conditions are frequently
mentioned as contributory reasons [for distorted child-parent relationship]; children regard
their quarters as being too crowded or too unkempt for entertaining their companions. Thus,
they connive to see their CRUISING BORDERS UNSETTLING IDENTITIES 50 companions outside of
the home, while parents blame the children’s misconduct on ‘bad associations.’”(p. 24) In Lee’s
analysis, the segregated racialized space was a significant if not the primary problem that the
Chinese communities faced in the process of assimilation. Noted here that the descriptions
about Chinatown were drastically similar to W.E.B. DuBois’ depictions of the “Black ghettos,”
which were conceptualized as the roots of the “Negro problems” (1899, p. viii). It indicates how
the process of racialization in the US always undergoes a spatial arrangement. The urban
restructuring of populations requires not only the institutionalization of racial hierarchy but
also a geopolitical imagination of ‘the American versus the un-American.’ The issues of juvenile
delinquency that Lee identified, was not only a single case-based issue, but was framed as a
“crisis” in the Bay Area Chinese communities in the early 1950 (Wu, 2014, p. 183). The shifting
focus from the ‘foreign enemy’ violently demonstrated in the Japanese internment to the ‘urban
social problem’ domestically must be understood in a transition in the realization of the Asian
populations from temporary migrants to permanent residents of the US, where there was an
increasing number of native-born, second generation immigrant children postwar (Lee, 2015, p.
259). The blatant form of othering Asian communities as the ‘Oriental outsiders’ was thus
transformed to a domestic spatial management in the ‘ethnic enclaves’ of the American cities.
Indeed, Chinatowns were not only defined as an urban social problem in the postwar America,
but also the embodiment of crimes and deviances that were associated with the immorality,
vice, and diseases—the general unfitness in the American life—in the public’s spatial
imagination. The geographical separation of the racialized communities due to the effects of
war intensified the crisis of the American urban spaces particularly during this period. CRUISING
BORDERS UNSETTLING IDENTITIES 51 The frontier of multiculturalism. While the mainland of the
US was fueled with the postwar anxiety of urban regeneration and reform, there was another
form of spatial articulation of Asianness taking shape in Hawaii. The wartime conceptualization
of Asianness as a position outside and in the opposite of the West rather than a raced
population was present in the psychological studies in Hawaii during this time. Hawaii, as the
frontier of WWII between the US mainland and Asia Pacific became a state in 1959 and
embodied the “foreign within” position in relation to the US mainland, and even an
experimental ground for multiculturalism prior to the second largest wave of Asian immigrants
post-1965. Published in Social Process in Hawaii, Yamamura’s (1956) study examined the
experiences of “Asiatic students” on Fulbright scholarship in Hawaii—which was the only
psychological study that referred to the Asian subject in the 1950s. Hawaii was described as the
“meeting place of peoples of the East and West” and “the area in which American democracy
demonstrates to peoples of Asia what it can do for Asiatics” (p. 73). The study consisted of eight
in-depth interviews of the Asian Fulbright grantees from various Asian Pacific countries including
Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, Korea, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam not only about
the academic matter but also about the host site in Hawaii in general. While the study largely
framed the Fulbright orientation program as a success of cultural mixing and a preparation site
for the grantees to adjust the life in the American mainland, it also documented some
discontents around the imposition of American assimilation. A Japanese grantee mentioned in
the interview: “Some of our boys feel that we are being Americanized—by this I mean, in class
we are taught how to behave in the dining room, answering telephones, and such. Some feel
this is not orientation, but an attempt to convert us into Americans. We have no wish to
become Americans” (Yamamura, 1956, p. 62). From this Japanese grantee’s testimony,
CRUISING BORDERS UNSETTLING IDENTITIES 52 we may get a sense of how Hawaii was
constructed as an experimental site of the American assimilation program for the professional
migrants just prior to statehood. Similar to the other two studies about the Japanese and the
Chinese, the barriers and possibilities of assimilation were the dominant psychological concerns
postwar. While WWII separated the Japanese as a particular unassimilable group and the
association with crimes made the Chinese morality questionable in the mainland, it also enabled
new spaces of intergroup racial contacts. As this study indicated, Hawaii and the Asian foreign
students were both a display of the crossing between the East and West. However, this
particularization of Hawaii as the Pacific frontier outside of the US, left the wartime spatial
configuration of the US and Asia intact. The intra- and interracial conflicts in the US again
remained unresolved at this time. Despite the heterogeneity and multiplicity in the ways that
Asian ethnic groups were considered, the themes of racial formation during the immediate
postwar period was a framing of nationality as culture—of loyalty and disloyalty, hardworking
and untrustworthy, morality and immorality— that marked one group as American and the
other un-American. Most of the studies at this time period were also conducted from a
standpoint of the White gaze that treated the Asian subject as a ‘scientific object’ that would
either verify or problematize the generalizable psychological processes, rather than
interrogating their subjectivities and narratives. While Asianness was not conceptualized as
homogenous race with common physical attributes or shared culture, they remained to be
spatially segregated entities in the minds of the psychologists and the American public. The
wartime pressure of conventionality and homogeneity demanded the one and only way of
being American through the path of assimilation. However, geopolitical tensions and domestic
segregation marked Asianness as an unassimilable other in the race making of the US.
(links here)
That dehumanizes the orient as an object to be conquered. Laundry list of
impacts colonization, hypersexualaizationa and tokenization
Bakli 14 (Sara, Free-lance writer and blogger, Published by Jenn Incorporation, Published April
17 2014, “What is Orientalism, and how is it also racism?”,
http://reappropriate.co/2014/04/what-is-orientalism-and-how-is-it-also-racism/) RR Jr
While Orientalism led to a Western fascination with Asia as an exotic land — equal parts
captivatingly romantic and terrifyingly barbaric — perhaps the most important aspect of Orientalism is how it defined Asian men and
women against the Western norms of gender identity. Compared to stalwart European men and chaste European
women, Asian men and women were recast in the European imagination as specific counter-
points to these expected gender norms: Asian women became hypersexualized , unsatiable,
creatures — in one Medieval text described as standing thirteen feet tall and having ox-tails emerging from their genitals, whereas described by Marco Polo as either
“dainty” courtesans or voracious prostitutes — whereas Asian men are portrayed as slight, stooping, meek and
unassertive barbarians who attack in faceless hordes to make up for their easy defeat in single combat by European men.
Furthermore, in Orientalism , the land of the Orient is, itself, feminized, which invites subsequent
conquest — in overtly sexual language — by the virile West . Polo discusses the many Asian wives that Western traders take,
literally wresting the Asian woman from the Asian man. Columbus’ endeavour to discover Asia by sea was cast as “taking possession” of these lands. Thus, in Orientalism, the
Orient is not merely the “Other” of the West, but an Other that stands as a prize or trophy, to
be dominated or conquered by the West. Importantly, when the West is the standard against which
the Orient is defined, the Orient cannot, by definition, be a point of empathy . As defined in its distance from
norm, Asia instead becomes a thing to be possessed, and populated with a people who are “not
quite normal” and therefore “not quite human ”. In short, when the Orient becomes a land of the
“Other”, the people of the Orient become the “Other” , too; Orientalism becomes
dehumanization. This, not surprisingly, paved the way for multiple Western efforts to colonize —
economically, culturally, and militaristically — Asia. I needn’t go into the many examples of the West’s incursions
into the East, all of which share at their core the perception that the West has a moral and cultural
imperative to subdue through whatever means necessary the bizarre traditions and abnormal people of the
Eastern “Other” based entirely upon the Orient’s “deviancy”.
Vote negative to reject the affirmative and close the ideological gap, the
negative is the trojan horse that seeks to wreck havoc unto the cohered
ideology of the affirmative.
Wang 13 Dorothy J. Wang is an Associate Professor in the American Studies Program at
Williams College. Winner of the 2016 Best Book in Literary Criticism Award, sponsored by the
Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS).Honorable Mention in the 2014 Pegasus Award
for Poetry Criticism, sponsored by the Poetry Foundation. Thinking Its Presence Form, Race, and
Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry 219-227 SP
The gure of Genghis Chan embodies the con ation of two “Orien- tal” characters that gure in the American popular imaginary: Char-
lie Chan and Genghis Khan. As is so with other racial minorities, stereotypes of Asian Americans tend to be
categorized along gender lines into two crude types: in the case of men, the “good,” submis-
sive Oriental (Charlie Chan, the houseboy) and the “evil” Oriental, represented by the barbaric
invader (Genghis Khan) or the sinisterly devious despot (Fu Manchu) or a combination of the
two (Ming the Merciless).30 Whether “good” or “evil,” all Orientals are viewed as equally
“inscrutable.” Like his detective namesake, Yau’s Genghis Chan works as a private eye. Through the Genghis Chan poems,
rYau parodies numerous discourses that have written both himself and other Chinese (Asian)
Americans: the mainstream media’s racist/Orientalist rendering of “Orientals,” the rhetoric of
detective novels and lm noir, ridicul- ing renditions of the “broken English” of early Chinese
immigrants, clichéd homespun American maxims, and Orientalized poetic foms (most notably
the haiku). Many of these discourses are themselves parasitic; for example, the character of
Charlie Chan—created by the Ohioan novelist Earl Derr Biggers, based on an actual Chinese
Amer- ican detective in Honolulu and portrayed by three different white actors in forty-seven
Hollywood lms31—constitutes a grotesque caricature, intended or not, of “Oriental”
behavior. Biggers created the character of Charlie Chan after vacationing in Hawaii, where he read about a Chinese American
detective in Hono- lulu named Chang Apana. Chan makes his rst cinematic appearance in 1926, played by an Asian American actor,
George Kuwa, in a small role in House Without a Key, but not until 1931, when Charlie Chan gets his own movie and is played by
Warner Oland in yellow- face (Sidney Toler takes over the role in 1938), does he really take off as a cinematic phenomenon,
becoming permanently ingrained in the American psyche. The last Charlie Chan movie was released in 1949, not coincidentally the
year that the United States “lost” China, and, in the American political imaginary, the little Asian “buddy” and World War II ally
turned into a Red Communist threat. Also noncoincidental was the casting of Eastern European actors who had been primarily
known for their horror- lm roles—Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney, Peter Lorre—as “Orientals” in Charlie Chan and other early
Hollywood lms depicting Asians (such as Shadows [1922], The Mask of Fu Manchu [1932], Shadow of Chinatown [1936], and Mr.
Wong, Detective [1938]).32 Many of these actors relied on regular gigs playing these characters (Peter Lorre as Mr. Moto, for one) to
make a living; at the same time, Asian Ameri- can actors’ careers and personal lives often ended tragically as a result of Hollywood’s
demeaning and exploitative use of them (for example, Anna May Wong).33 Whether evil or “good,” these Oriental
characters always spoke broken English and were viewed as unredeemably alien. They were
parodies themselves of some “Oriental” essence and culture : “I come from a China no Chinese
from China comes from,” says the Chinese American narrator who plays Charlie Chan’s son in
Frank Chin’s story “Sons of Chan” (154). In Hollywood, Asian culture and customs were made
ridiculous, sinister, and always inhuman. Needless to say, Asian Americans were never depicted
as “regular Americans”—or as Americans at all, even if their roots in the United States went
back to the mid-nineteenth century, as was not uncom- mon in California (Anna May Wong,
born in 1905 in Los Angeles, was herself a third-generation American).34 Since Hollywood
characterizations were the only widely disseminated depictions of Asians available to Asian
Americans growing up in the United States, it is not an understatement to say that their sense of
identity, ethnic and American and ethnic American, were formed to a great extent by these
distorted mirrors on-screen. As the narrator in Chin’s “Sons of Chan” puts it, “God kicked Earl
Derr Biggers in the head and commanded him to give us Chinamans [sic] a son, in almost His
image. And Charlie Chan was born. And, in a sense, so was I. . . . I had a white man for a father”
(132). (“Father” signi es a family patriarch but also God, the logos, the Word.) Yau told me dur-
ing an interview that when he was around seven, his parents left him at the movies to watch
double features instead of getting a babysitter; thus, in a real sense, he, too, was formed by the
movies. In contrast to the aphorism-spouting, effeminate, and subservi- ent Charlie Chan—“led
by a white man, speak[ing] with a broken tongue, and . . . docile and polite to a fault”35—
another detective g- ure was emerging in American lm: that of the (white) tough-guy private eye
in lm noir, inspired by the detective ction of such writers as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell
Hammett. This character was a taciturn, masculine loner, played in the movies by actors such as
Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum (one of Yau’s favorites and whose laconic manner Yau’s
somewhat resembles). It is these two traditions—Orientalist/racist Hollywood depictions of
the “Chinese,” and the tough-guy American genres of detective ction and lm noir—that coalesce
in the gure of Genghis Chan (whose rst name evokes yellow-peril fantasies of invading,
marauding “Asiatics”). The absurd con ation of Genghis Chan and Charlie Chan signals obvious
parodic intent to the reader—or should. The rst seven poems in the “Genghis Chan: Private
Eye” (hereaf- ter, “GC”) series appear in Radiant Silhouette: New and Selected Work: 1974–
1988. What is being parodied in these poems is not so much dis- crete, speci c, and localized
“target texts” but amorphous and omnipresent popular discourses. In some cases, Yau
parodies what are themselves already parodies (that is, parodies of “Asian” mannerisms and
speech). The all-pervasiveness and diffuseness of these discourses make it dif cult for the Asian
American poet to ght them. Parody provides one means of bringing close (or closer) these
overweaning ideologies, which manifest themselves in language, in an attempt to deconstruct
and disarm them. In his genealogical account of the novel in “Prehistory,” Bakhtin focuses on two factors—“one . . .
laughter, the other polyglossia”—in the prehistory of novelistic discourse (original italics; 50). Laughter, as a root of parody, is
important not just for its comic elements but also for its subversive ones, as Bakhtin delineates in his essay “Epic and Novel: Toward
a Methodology for the Study of the Novel”: It is precisely laughter that . . . in general destroys any hierarchical (distancing and
valorized) distance. . . . Laughter
has the remarkable power of making an object come up close, of
drawing it into a zone of crude contact where one can nger it familiarly on all sides, turn it
upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and below, break open its external shell, look
into its center, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely
and experi- ment with it. Laughter demolishes fear and piety before an object, before a world,
. . . thus clearing the ground for an absolutely free investigation of it.36 Parody provides the
“zone of crude contact” by literally internalizing the words of the dominant discourses in
much the same way that minority Americans have internalized mainstream myths, stereo-
types, and ideologies. Bakhtin explains that the first step toward liberating “one’s own
discourse and one’s own voice . . . from the authority of the other’s discourse” is first to
assimilate that other discourse so that it is “tightly interwoven with ‘one’s own word,’” to
“experience it physically as an object.”37
2NC/1NR
Overview
Orientalism fuels the exploitation of Alien labor by creating distinct

dichotomies from the Social Hegemon, the enlightened western male, in
contrast to the not-quite-human, the effeminate, irrational, “other”. This
dichotomy serves as a justification for endless forms of mental and physical
violence such as forms of structural depression or drone strikes and military
interventions in order to stabilize and tame the “other”. We deconstruct this
dichotomy and its impacts by (alt), meaning we are the only side capable of
resolving our impacts and the dichotomy caused by systems of Orientalism.
Our alternative is the insertion of our discourse into the debate space which
tears down and deconstructs primary forms of ideology that create subject
formations regarding the west and the “other”
Additional 1NC Cards
Bakil
Have no tolerance towards orientalism. It’s become so ingrained in Asian
culture that Asians subconsciously accept it as truth.
A quick consideration of the many anti-Asian stereotypes of today reveal their roots in the
over-arching Orientalism that still persists in the West’s conception of the East. We are the
Perpetual Foreigner — never quite normal, never quite “one of us”: this is a contemporary
recapitulation of the Asian as the “Orientalized Other”. Sexually, many of the gender
stereotypes that were first invented during Marco Polo’s time — the hypersexualized lotus
blossoms and dragon ladies; the barbaric and cowardly effeminate men — still thrive today.
Even the Model Minority myth has its roots in Orientalism: simultaneous awe of exotic Asian
cultural traditions that emphasize academia with fear of the intellectual Chinese Yellow Peril
threat. Orientalism is frequently mistaken as being synonymous with cultural appropriation and
misappropriation because the fantasy of Orientalism has been constructed and reinforced
through the misappropriation of exaggerated Eastern cultural traits and practices to build and
maintain the East as an exotic place of beauty and terror. When Katy Perry goes all-out geisha,
she is invoking and perpetuating the theatre of Orientalism. When challenged, defenders of
Orientalism will claim that this theatre is a “love declaration” (as Vincent Vidal writes above),
forgetting that these “love declarations” bear little resemblance to the culture from which
they are appropriated, and further removes the agency of the East to “represent itself, [thereby
preventing] true understanding”, as Said writes. Furthermore, Orientalism refers not just to the
cultural appropriation, but to the impact this appropriation has on our percepetion of Asia
and Asian-ness. Orientalism is more fundamentally the positioning of Asian people as the
proverbial “Other”, always serving as a counter-point to the normative West, forever an
orbiting satellite, never able to define itself for itself within the Western cannon. Orientalism
eternally casts the Asian person as stereotype, and never allows the Asian body to be
“normal”.
Bald
Alien labor was divided into spheres that were acceptable and those that were
not, the aff’s hyper-focus on skilled laborers from the Orient creates a state of
exception that simultaneously fetishizes their labor skills while meshing them
into the category of the radical, subversive threat to be wary of
Bald 15, Vivek Bald is a scholar, writer, and documentary filmmaker whose work focuses on
histories of migration and diaspora, particularly from the South Asian subcontinent. He is the
author of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Harvard University
Press, 2013), and co-editor, with Miabi Chatterji, Sujani Reddy, and Manu Vimalassery of The
Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power (NYU Press, 2013). Dissent Spring
2015, (American Orientalism) https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/american-orientalism jl
Between 1904 and 1917, while working-class and expatriate Indians were targeted in acts of
xenophobic violence, denounced as economic and political threats and marked for exclusion,
white Americans continued to fantasize about exotic “India,” which provided a seemingly
endless supply of material for consumption. However, then as now, xenophobia and Indophilia were not simply
contradictory attitudes that played out in two separate social spheres—that is, South Asians were not simply
denigrated in political debates over immigration restriction while they were simultaneously
celebrated in popular culture. Instead, each sphere generated its own set of distinctions between
who was desirable and who was not, and each set of distinctions reinforced the other. The
anti-Asian immigration laws of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are commonly known as
“exclusion acts” and the years that they were in effect as the “exclusion era.” However, the 1882
Chinese Exclusion Act, the 1885 Alien Contract Labor Law, and the 1917 Immigration Act were never straightforward acts of Asian
exclusion, nor was the 1965 Hart-Cellar Immigration Act—the law that is credited with ending the exclusion era—an act that fully
“opened the door” to Asian immigration. All four of these Acts—in effect and in intent—helped define who within Asian populations
was welcome and who was not. In crafting the restrictions of the 1882, 1885, and 1917 Acts, U.S. lawmakers delineated specific
categories of Asians who were, in fact, legally permitted to enter the United States, to be educated here, and to work. These
“provisos” that were tacked onto the exclusion laws, in different combinations and at different times, permitted entry of: merchants,
students, the servants of traveling royalty and foreign government officials, “professional actors, artists, lecturers, or singers,”
workers with specialized skills not available in the United States, “government officers, ministers . . . missionaries, lawyers,
physicians, chemists, civil engineers, . . . authors,” as well as nurses and “persons belonging to any recognized learned profession .”
Although the number of South Asian immigrants entering under these exemptions was small,
the so-called exclusion laws introduced a logic that certain South Asians were admissible —or
desirable—because of their class, education, and profession. This was ultimately the logic
enshrined in the “occupational preferences” provisions of the 1965 Immigration Act; the
legislation brought thousands of South Asian doctors, engineers, and other professionals to
the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, while keeping working-class migration to a minimum .
Ideas of solving for radicalism, subversion, American jobs, even citizenship itself
functionally creates the category of the “other” in order to further its
biopolitical control over them
Bald 15, Vivek Bald is a scholar, writer, and documentary filmmaker whose work focuses on
histories of migration and diaspora, particularly from the South Asian subcontinent. He is the
author of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Harvard University
Press, 2013), and co-editor, with Miabi Chatterji, Sujani Reddy, and Manu Vimalassery of The
Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power (NYU Press, 2013). Dissent Spring
2015, (American Orientalism) https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/american-orientalism jl
At the same time, as historian Seema Sohi has argued, Indians occupied a unique place in the broader anti-
Asian rhetoric of the early twentieth century. Because Indian nationalist exiles had been using what they believed
to be the safety of U.S. soil to plan and coordinate anti-colonial activities against the British, they became a focus of the
state’s broad efforts to quell political radicalism in the 1910s . While West Coast labor leaders
warned of a “Tide of Turbans” sweeping in from the Pacific to take away American workers’
jobs, congressional advocates for exclusion warned that Indian immigrants were promoting
subversion, Bolshevism, and anarchism, and were a threat to national security. In 1917 British,
Canadian, and U.S. officials collaborated to round up dozens of Indian men for conspiring to smuggle arms through the United States
to overthrow British rule on the subcontinent. Their San Francisco trial was not only front-page news across the country but became
the most expensive federal trial up to that point in American history. The anti-Indian agitation that began with the 1907 Bellingham
riots came to a kind of culmination by 1917. In early February—a month before the first arrests in the “Hindu-German Conspiracy”
case—Congress passed a sweeping Immigration Act. The Act capped off thirty-five years of increasingly restrictive anti-Asian
immigration laws that had begun with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The
1917 law’s key provision broadened
the scope of exclusion; it prohibited all labor immigration from what it defined as the “Asiatic
Barred Zone,” a huge swath of territory that stretched from Afghanistan and the eastern Arabian peninsula in the West to
China and the Southeast Asian archipelago in the East. While immigration had become more and more
difficult for Indian workers in preceding years, crossing the U.S. border was now a criminal act.
Indians who were already in the country faced other restrictions: laws forbidding them from
owning property and, in 1923, a Supreme Court decision that rendered them ineligible from
becoming U.S. citizens. The early twentieth century is often trumpeted as the moment in
which the United States truly became a “nation of immigrants.” For the vast majority of
people from what is now known as South Asia, it was the moment in which the United States
became a nation of immigrant exclusion.
Links – Policy Affs
Afghanistan
The affirmative continues the discourse of “saving” Afghanistan, reinforcing the
paternalism and colonialism behind US actions
Crowe 7 (L. A. Crowe, Researcher, York Centre for International and Security Studies, York University, 2007, “The “Fuzzy
Dream”: Discourse, Historical myths, and Militarized (in)Security - Interrogating dangerous myths of Afghanistan and the ‘West’”
http://archive.sgir.eu/uploads/Crowe-loricrowe.pdf)
The ‘heroism’ narrative can be called by several names: the ‘saviour syndrome’, “mediatically generated” or “hybrid techno-
medical” humanitarianism58, “foreign aid”, “humanitarian intervention”, etc. This narrative constructs foreign
engagement in a region as spectacle and as prized commodities to be admired and ‘sold’ to the
public; it constructs the West as ‘saviours’ and the ‘Other’, in this case Afghanistan, as the victim in
need of saving, accomplished through images and tales of passion and fervour that often pathologize the other and valorize the
Western interveener. When the US, with the support of the UN, bombed Afghanistan in 2001in response to the events of September
11th, the mission was entitled “Operation Enduring Freedom”. Today, as
reconstruction and ‘peace-building’ efforts
are underway in Afghanistan in tandem with military operations, political conversations and
media productions are saturated with calls to “win the hearts and minds” of the people of
Afghanistan and of the necessary and benevolent role the West must play in instilling ‘freedom’,
‘justice’ and ‘democracy’ in the war-torn and poverty stricken region. Debrix, offers an analysis of what he calls “the
global humanitarian spectacle” to demonstrate how medical and humanitarian NGO’s simulate “heroism, sentiment, and
compassion”; medical catastrophes and civil conflicts, he explains, have indeed become prized commodities for
globalizing neoliberal policies of Western states and international organizations to sell to ‘myth
readers’: “They give Western states and the UN the opportunity to put their liberal humanistic
policies into practice, while, for Western media, humanitarianism simply sells”.59 There are several repercusions of this
myth, explains Debrix. First, this has resulted in real humanitarian and moral issues being overlooked;
Second, images are being purged of their content. Myth has thus becoming the very real enemy
of true humanitarianism; that is, we’ve become so inundates with superhero mythologization of
real world events that the embedded paternalism and unrealistic goals go unnoticed .60 Additionally,
this narrative reinforces a victimology of the ‘Other’ and in fact capitalises on it, while
simultaneously hiding the paternalistic and neo-colonialist ideologies in humanitarian garb. The
role of the media and consciously generated and disseminated images is particularly pronounced here, as passion and spectacle are
valued in the commodification of images over content and history. Jean Baudrillard states “There is no possible distinction, at the
level of images and information, between the spectacular and the symbolic, no possible distinction between the ‘crime’ and the
crackdown”.61
Biogenics/eugenics
The affirmatives sorting of which Asian can enter the US is a form of biogenic
control, their epistemology is rooted in hemispheric orientalism that through
the plan secures the transnationality and normativity of whiteness itself
Day 16 Specialization:Asian American literature and visual culture, Critical Ethnic Studies,
Marxism, Settler Colonial Studies, Queer of Color Critique, American Studies.Iyko Day’s research
focuses on the intersection of Asian racialization, Indigeneity, and capitalism in North America.
She has publications that explore the settler biopolitics of landscape art; the settler colonial
logics of Japanese internment in Canada, the US, and Australia; as well as articles examining
comparative racial formation in Canada and the US and comparative Asian Canadian and Asian
American literary history. Her articles have appeared in journals such as American
Quarterly, Amerasia Journal, and Canadian Literature. Her book, Alien Capital: Asian
Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Duke UP, 2016) retheorizes the history
and logic of settler colonialism by examining its intersection with capitalism and the racialization
of Asian immigrants to Canada and the United States. Through an analysis of Asian American
and Asian Canadian literature and visual culture, she explores how the historical alignment of
Asian bodies and labor with capital’s abstract and negative dimensions became one of settler
colonialism's foundational and defining features. Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and The Logic
of Settler Colonial Logic 65-67
By putting his alien excess into racial tension with the landscape, Tseng’s parody of early
twentieth-century landscape art brings to light a romantic idealization of nature that, in the
context of North America, is infused with eugenic ideologies of white racial regeneration.
Evolving out of social Darwinist theory, eugenics emerged in the late nineteenth century and
grew in the early decades of the twentieth century with the support of both conservatives and
progressives. As Daniel Kevles explains, “The progressives and the conservatives found
common ground in attributing phenomena such as crime, slums, prostitution, and alcoholism
primarily to biology and in believing that biology might be used to eliminate these
discordances of modern, urban, industrial society.”37 According to Kevles, racial thinking
“played a major part in American and Canadian versions of this [eugenic] creed,”38 based on
fears raised from the influx of non–Anglo Saxon immigrants and the social degeneracy those
groups were associated with. The 1920s and early 1930s represented the apex in the eugenics
movement, with the passage of numerous eugenics sterilization laws—particularly in
California, British Columbia, and Alberta—which inordinately targeted racial minorities and
immigrants.39 While the scientific justification for eugenics had waned slightly after World War
I, eugenics nevertheless persisted in institutionalized forms. Knowledge of eugenics’ false
claims did not, as Mary Coutts and Pat McCarrick explain, “decrease the pressure for legislation,
judicial action, or immigration controls.”40 Indeed, immigration restrictions directed at Chinese
migrants to the United States and Canada coincided with the intensification of eugenic
ideology from the nineteenth century into the twentieth. After passage of the 1875 Page Act,
which effectively restricted the entry of Chinese women for their presumed sexual immorality,
the United States passed its first race-based federal immigration restriction through the
Chinese Exclusion Act, which was in effect from 1882 to 1943. In 1885 the Canadian
government passed its own race-based immigration restriction through the Chinese Head Tax,
a tax designed to deter Chinese migrants from entering Canada. By the mid-1920s, both
Canada and the United States had intensified and expanded earlier restrictions on Chinese
migrants. In Canada these measures extended restrictions to other Asian migrants and further
deterred Chinese immigration through the passage of the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923,
which excluded most classes of Chinese migrants until 1947. The United States, having also
broadened restrictions to encompass other Asian migrants, passed the Immigration Act of 1924,
which intensified previous race-based restrictions through its exclusion of most Asian ethnic
groups and foreigners who were deemed “biologically inferior.”41 The persistence and growth
of anti-Asian policy from the 1880s to the 1940s reflects what Erika Lee refers to as the
“hemispheric Orientalism” that took hold along the West Coast of North America.42 Despite
their nationalist pretensions, Canada and the United States were bound by a shared
commitment to preserving the transnational power and normativity of whiteness. As Marilyn
Lake and Henry Reynolds put it, the “project of whiteness was a paradoxical politics, at once
transnational in its inspiration and identifications but nationalist in its method and goals.”43
Fears over the degeneration of Anglo-Saxon stock were present in the art world as well. The Canadian
Group of Seven painters reflected these anxieties over the diminishing strength of the white Nordic race
in their painting, believing that the Canadian landscape held “replenishing power” that could disinfect
what one member called a “low receptive reservoir into which pours the chaos of ages, the mixed
concord and discord of many varied peoples.”44 Employing tropes associated with hygiene and mental
health, they put forward a mission to “clean this reservoir . . . or we will remain a confused people.”45 In
the US context, Deborah Bright draws out the anticapitalist basis of Ansel Adams’s romanticism, noting
that his early twentieth-century photographs represented a “mixture of Progressive Era phobias about
industrialization and encroaching alien populations with an equally conservative nostalgia for the myth of
preindustrial organic society.”46 Fears of white race suicide also informed Gutzon Borglum’s vision of
Mount Rushmore, a colossal-scale sculptural project that he began in 1924 and did not live to see
completed seventeen years later. Expressing his fears of miscegenation, he once wrote, “Here we have in
the filtering of Asiatic and North African blood [into Europe] the complete vitiating of the vigor and
intellect of the civilization existing in these once pure European peoples.”47 Thus romantic,
regenerative, and preservationist motifs were infused in North American landscape art of the
period and reflected deep anxieties over the racial “health” of the industrializing settler
nation. And despite the absence of human or nonwhite representation in many of these works,
my analysis of these landscapes heeds Martin Berger’s assessment that in North American art
since the nineteenth century, “a decidedly racialized perspective animated even those cultural
products most removed from racial concerns.”48 The hyperbolic orientalism of Tseng’s persona
in the Expeditionary Series confronts these defensive logics embedded in the romanticized
colonial landscape in ways that denaturalize the abstract, universalizing, and absorptive power
of its conventions. As such, Tseng’s photographs tap into the historicism of parody, which Linda
Hutcheon defines as “an inscription of the past in the present [that] embod[ies] and bring[s] to
life actual historical tensions.”49 In Chinese drag, Tseng’s exaggerated performance “mimes and
renders hyperbolic” a host of normative race, gendered, and sexual conventions that are literally
and figuratively naturalized in the landscape.50 As the alien, the dissonance between his body
and the landscape delineates the racialized abstraction of Asians and their symbolic excess to
national culture. The Chinese male body in North America was historically constituted as
nonreproductive, perverse, and feminized, which was reinforced through legal and extralegal
restrictions on interracial intimacies, restrictions on the immigration of Chinese women, and
aggressive enclosure in the domestic labor market. Thus the alien sexuality Tseng elicits can also
be seen as the product of a biopolitical landscape whose regenerative energy is directed at the
degeneration and exclusion of alien bodies. Moreover, as a queer artist who referred to himself
as a “snow queen” because of his preference for white men,51 Tseng’s queer white desire—a
desire for incorporation into a white landscape of artists and gay culture—creates a productive
tension with the gender and sexual objectification of the Asian body. The conflicted relations
and identifications that Tseng’s photography stages capture a mode of disidentification that
negotiates “between desire, identification, and ideology.”52 Disrupting an exceptionalist
imagining of Canada or the United States as a concrete, pristine wilderness, Tseng’s
photographs reframe the settler colonial landscape as a racial borderland of symbolic violence.
Central asia
Western representations exaggerate Central Asian threats as something to be
contained and pacified
Heathershaw and Megoran 11 – Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Exeter, working on the
politics of aid and conflict resolution in Central Asia; and political geography lecturer at Newcastle Univerity, in the school of
Geography, Politics and Sociology (John and Nick, 6/16. Central Asia: the discourse of danger,” http://www.opendemocracy.net/od-
russia/john-heathershaw-nick-megoran/central-asia-discourse-of-danger)
Question: What do a recently-released International
Crisis Group report (‘Tajikistan: the changing insurgent
threats’) and the latest Red River computer game (‘Operation Flashpoint’) have in common? Answer: They
both feature Islamist insurgents infiltrating Tajikistan and posing a threat to Western security . In
fact such portrayals of Central Asia are commonplace in the West , from popular culture to the
quasi-academic work of policy analysts. In research conducted since the 1990s, we have charted how UK and US
representations of Central Asia routinely present it as especially dangerous, fusing the traditional
insecurities of the Orient to dysfunctional post-Soviet authoritarianism. This has elicited a small debate on the margins of Central
Asian studies about the significance of the discourse of danger. In response, we wrote a paper on the subject that was presented at
Chatham House and recently published in the journal International Affairs (‘Contesting danger: a new agenda for policy and
scholarship on Central Asia’), outlining three features of the Western discourse of danger on Central Asia. By ‘Western discourse of
danger on Central Asia’ we mean how Western policy, popular and even academic accounts identify Central Asia as obscure,
ethnically and politically fractious, essentially Oriental and—for these reasons—dangerous. Typically, Central Asia is spuriously
identified as a source of a considerable Islamic terrorist threat as in the recent International Crisis Group report on Tajikistan. It can
also mean that ethnicconflict is misread and great power conflict is assumed where in fact it may
not exist. Why does the overlap between popular culture and policy analysis matter? The link we make between computer
games and policy reports may seem trite. Surely these are incommensurable genres of discourse for quite diverse audiences and
with wholly different intentions? Surely one is primarily for the entertainment of adolescent males, and the other seeks serious
understanding in order to change policy? We should not be too quick to dismiss the effect of popular culture on policy making.
Many of the Western military misadventures which have been undertaken since the end of the Cold War may have been made more
likely by the feeling of interconnectedness generated by new technologies and cultural forms such as the internet. The portrayal of
the military and intelligence services in the era of the ‘war on terror’ are often critical, but most ascribe to governments an ability to
get things done which far exceeds what is practically possible in a globalised world. There are three reasons why popular culture
matters in policymaking, and which justify the making of links between forms of representations from quite different genres. Firstly,
there is the basic point that in Western democracies government are more or less responsive to public opinion. If citizens feel
Afghanistan is an essentially dangerous place then they are more likely to accept the problematic argument of their governments
that threats to the West will continue to come from that country unless we offer military support to a government we have placed in
power. On the other hand, public interest in Central Asia is so limited that few votes are cast and few letters are sent to MPs on the
basis of concern about the region. Public opinion only indirectly affects foreign policy and we should not overstate the link between
the two. In many respects it is the effect of popular culture on those that do research and make decisions, in governments and non-
governmental organisations, that is most significant. Secondly , the
dearth of knowledge on the region amongst
so-called experts means that popular culture and quasi-academic studies have greater
significance. Misguided applications of the ‘great game’ or the idea of Muslim
radicalisation are frequently left unchallenged. Moreover, even powerful Western
governments have relatively few people with knowledge of the region and its languages. Area studies has
been in decline for decades and nowhere is the phenomenon more acute than Central Asia where there was very little knowledge of
the region even during the Cold War when funding was poured into the development of Sovietology. Finally, and most
importantly, knowledge is produced interpretatively . This means that where ideas about the region emerge that
associate it with conflict, Islamism and great power conflict they are often difficult to shift even when academic knowledge seems to
refute these claims.
Shocks cause cooperation – your discourse causes escalation

Collins and Wohlforth 4 (Kathleen, Professor of Political Science – Notre Dame and William, Professor of Government
– Dartmouth, “Defying ‘Great Game’ Expectations”, Strategic Asia 2003-4: Fragility and Crisis, p. 312-313)
Conclusion The popular greatgame lens for analyzing Central Asia fails to capture the declared
interests of the great powers as well as the best reading of their objective interests in security and
economic growth. Perhaps more importantly, it fails to explain their actual behavior on the ground, as
well the specific reactions of the Central Asian states themselves. Naturally, there are competitive elements
in great power relations. Each country’s policymaking community has slightly different preferences for tackling the challenges
presented in the region, and the more influence they have the more able they are to shape events in concordance with those
preferences. But these clashing preferences concern the means to serve ends that all the great powers share. To be sure, policy-
makers in each capital would prefer that their own national firms or their own government’s budget be the beneficiaries of any
economic rents that emerge from the exploitation and transshipment of the region’s natural resources. But the scale of these rents
is marginal even for Russia’s oil-fueled budget. And for taxable profits to be created, the projects must make sense economically—
something that is determined more by markets and firms than governments. Does it matter? The great game is an arresting
metaphor that serves to draw people’s attention to an oft-neglected region. The problem is the great-game
lens can
distort realities on the ground, and therefore bias analysis and policy. For when great powers are locked in a
competitive fight, the issues at hand matter less than their implication for the relative power of contending states. Power itself
becomes the issue—one that tends to be nonnegotiable. Viewing
an essential positive-sum relationship
through zero sum conceptual lenses will result in missed opportunities for cooperation that leaves
all players—not least the people who live in the region—poorer and more insecure. While cautious realism must remain the
watchword concerning an impoverished and potentially unstable region comprised of fragile and authoritarian states, our
analysis yields at least conditional and relative optimism. Given the confluence of their chief strategic
interests, the major powers are in a better position to serve as a stabilizing force than analogies
to the Great Game or the Cold War would suggest. It is important to stress that the region’s response to the
profoundly destabilizing shock of coordinated terror attacks was increased cooperation between local
governments and China and Russia, and—multipolar rhetoric notwithstanding—between both of them and the United States. If this
trend is nurtured and if the initial signals about potential SCO-CSTO-NATO cooperation are pursued, another destabilizing
shock might generate more rather than less cooperation among the major powers. Uzbekistan,
Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan are clearly on a trajectory that portends longer-term
cooperation with each of the great powers. As military and economic security interests become more
entwined, there are sound reasons to conclude that “great game” politics will not shape Central
Asia’s future in the same competitive and destabilizing way as they have controlled its past. To the contrary, mutual
interests in Central Asia may reinforce the broader positive developments in the great powers’ relations that
have taken place since September 11, as well as reinforce regional and domestic stability in Central Asia.
China threat
Portrayals of China are intertwined with orientalist tropes of an untrustworthy
east which recreates serial policy failure and threat projections
Su & D’Arcangelis 17 Su-Mei Ooi is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Butler
Universtiy and Gwen D’ Arcangelis is an Assistant Professor in gender studies at Skidmore
College. Framing China: Discourses of othering in US news and political rhetoric (270-271)//SP
Western construction of the cultural and moral inferiority of China has had a long history and includes an array
of portrayals that can be read in light of specific European and US colonial aims. These include images of
China as exotic and immoral in the 1700s, as a cunning and diabolical “Yellow Peril” in the late 1800s, as a freedom-loving
and democracy-loving “China Mystique” during World War II, and as an ideological, economic, and military
“Red Peril” during the Cold War (Kim, 2010; Leong, 2005). Since the end of the Cold War and the definitive establishment of US
global hegemony, China has vacillated in the US imaginary between the latter two positions, viewed at times as a little brother
following imperfectly the path toward modernity, at times imperiling the world order (Kim, 2010; Vukovich, 2012). This ambiguity continues to occur
through the present day and, in light of China’s rise as a global power since the late 1990s, China is increasingly portrayed, not
necessarily an enemy, but always a potential one. This construction of China as a potential enemy Other reflects the relationship of
mutual interdependence carefully cultivated by many US administrations at the same time that it functions to justify the paternalistic monitoring and
policing of China to ensure that China never overtakes the United States on the world stage. With this frame in mind, we
examine the
recapitulation of Orientalist tropes in the post-Cold War context, focusing, in particular, on representations and language used in
US news media and political rhetoric. We examine three highly charged economic and security issue areas where the othering of China
is perceptible: (1) China’s currency valuation, (2) cyber intrusions that target commercial and
military information, and (3) maritime territorial and exclusive economic zone (EEZ) disputes.
We focus on three tropes that emerged in our analysis of each of these areas: China as cheat, thief, and lawless bully,
respectively. Each trope can be situated in relation to Orientalism, and thereby, we argue, recapitulates
(or attempts to recapitulate) US dominance. As these Orientalist tropes are likely to detract from the ability of the US public
to make fair assessments of US China policy, we also counter these Orientalist depictions with a more nuanced picture of China’s policies and actions, in
the process demonstrating how one might come to better understand these specific issue areas in the US–China bilateral relationship. Before doing so,
we turn to a brief discussion of our data sources and methods. Our study draws not only on the theoretical framework of Orientalism but also
on the literature that demonstrates the role of images in US policy-making —both to articulate and to
generate support for US foreign policy. Most notably, US foreign policy expert Oliver Turner has shown that “ American images of China
are inextricable from the formulation and enactment of Washington’s foreign policies toward
China,” a significant contribution to literatures that provide only materialist accounts of US China policy
(2014). For instance, US involvement in the Opium War with China was ostensibly incompatible with its
anti-Imperialist identity, which makes a solely materialist account of the policy choice inadequate. Turner
argues that policy consensus could only have been reached by a certain representation of China—China
was backward and anachronistic, and her people were in need of Western intervention—which helped to
justify an Imperialist war (Turner, 2014). Indeed, we follow in the wake of numerous Critical International
Relations scholars who, drawing on insights gained through Edward Said’s work on Orientalism, have
established the role that othering plays in shaping and justifying US domestic and foreign policies (Buzan
& Wæver, 2003; de Buitrago, 2012; Steuter & Wills, 2010; Turner, 2014). Our analysis focuses on two key
sites of US national discourse on China—the news media and political rhetoric (or strategic
communicative action that could be taken by a range of actors, including political leaders and pundits, in
order to persuade the public on a given political issue) culled from publicly circulated official documents
and reported statements from various online media sources. Public statements made by political
leaders and official documents were chosen because the political rhetoric employed there
shapes public opinion of China, US–China relations and US China policy. The news media was also chosen as a
primary site for discourse analysis because it constitutes an important means through which
the US public garners information and ideas about US foreign policy. Political rhetoric and news media texts were examined to
establish the presence of Orientalist themes identified in the literature, particularly as delineated by Asian American Studies scholars Jodi Kim (2010)
and Karen Leong (2005). We identified Orientalist themes through a preliminary perusal of publicly available official policy documents, statistics,
analyses, and recommendations from political and economic think tanks and published academic articles. By triangulating data gathered from these
various sources, we identified prominent Orientalist themes within the issue areas of China’s
national currency valuation, cyber activities, and maritime disputes in the East China Sea and
South China Sea; these characterizations were China as cheat, thief, and lawless bully, respectively.
Each theme was a manifestation , we theorize, of the construction of China as potential enemy ,
drawing on older discourses of China as the Red Peril, and at times even the Yellow Peril, as well as newer discourses of the “sleeping giant”— a
post–Cold War version of the “little brother” who threatens to overtake his elder. Our analysis (in
subsequent sections) describes in more detail the way that each trope manifests the discourse of Orientalism
The Aff’s painting of a rising east threat transposes asia as the shadow of settler
anxieties that justifies global expansionism and hegemony, while justifying the
importation of Asian immigrants as a racialized laborforce to grease the wheels
of the transnationality of whiteness itself
Lowe 98 Lisa Lowe is Distinguished Professor of English and Humanities,[1] a faculty member
of the Consortium of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora,[2] and Director of the Center
for the Humanities at Tufts University.[3] Prior to joining Tufts in 2012, she taught at Yale
Universityand at the University of California, San Diego.[4] From 1998 to 2001, she served as the
chair of the Literature Department at UC San Diego. She began as a scholar of comparative
literature, and her work has focused on literatures and cultures of encounter that emerge from
histories of colonialism, immigration, and globalization. She is known especially for her work
on French and British colonialisms and postcolonial literature, Asian immigration and Asian
American studies, race and empire, and comparative global humanities. The Power of Culture 2-
3
“Asia” has always been a complex site upon which the manifold anxieties of the United States
nation-state have been figured: such anxieties have both figured Asian countries as exotic,
barbaric, and alien, and Asian laborers immigrating to the United States from the nineteenth
century onward as a “yellow peril” threatening to displace White European
immigrants. 6 Orientalist racializations of Asians as physically and intellectually different from “Whites” predominated especially
in periods in which a domestic crisis of capital was coupled with nativist anti-Asian backlash and intersected significantly with
immigration exclusion acts and laws against naturalization of Chinese in 1882, Asian Indians in 1917, Japanese and Koreans in 1924,
and Filipinos in 1934. 7 Exclusionist rhetoric ranged from nativist agitation which claimed that “servile coolie” Chinese labor
undercut “free white” labor, to declarations about the racial unassimilability of the Japanese, to arguments that Asian social
organization threatened the integrity of [End Page 8] American political institutions. 8 During the crises of national identity that
occurred in periods of United States war in Asia — with the Philippines (1898–1910), against Japan (1941–45), in Korea (1950–53),
and in Viet Nam (1955–75) — American
orientalism displaced United States expansionist interests in
Asia onto racialized figurations of Asian workers within the national space. Although predictions of
Asian productivity supplanting European economic dominance have gripped the European and American imaginations since the
nineteenth century, in the period from World War II onward, “Asia”has emerged as a particularly complicated
“double-front” of threat and encroachment for the United States. On the one hand, Asian states
have become prominent as external rivals in overseas imperial war and in global economy,
and on the other, Asian immigrants are still a necessary, racialized labor force within the
domestic national economy. Immigration exclusion acts and naturalization laws have thus
been not only a means of regulating the terms of the citizen and the nation-state, but also an
intersection of the legal and political terms with an orientalist discourse that defined Asians as
culturally and racially “other” in times when the United States was militarily and economically
at war with Asia. Historically and materially, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Asian Indian, and Filipino immigrants have played
crucial roles in the building and the sustaining of America; at certain times, these immigrants have been fundamental to the
construction of the nation as a simulacrum of inclusiveness. Yet the
project of imagining the nation as
homogeneous requires the orientalist construction of cultures and geographies from which
Asian immigrants come as fundamentally “foreign” origins antipathetic to the modern
American society that “discovers,” “welcomes,” and “domesticates” them. A national memory
haunts the conception of the Asian American, persisting beyond the repeal of actual laws
prohibiting Asians from citizenship from 1943 to 1952 and sustained by the wars in Asia, in which
the Asian is always seen as an immigrant, as the “foreigner-within,” even when born in the United States and the descendant of
generations born here before. 9 It is this premise that Barroga’s play highlights through the veterans’ objection that Maya Lin’s
monument cannot represent the American nation. The [End Page 9] American soldier, who has in every way submitted to the nation,
is the quintessential citizen and therefore the ideal representative of the nation, yet the
American of Asian descent
remains the symbolic “alien,” the metonym for Asia, who by definition cannot be imagined as
sharing in America. 10 Narratives of immigrant inclusion — stories of the Asian immigrant’s journey from
foreign strangeness to assimilation and citizenship — may in turn attempt to produce cultural integration and its symbolization on
the national political terrain. Yet these same narratives are
driven by the repetition and return of episodes in
which the Asian American, even as a citizen, continues to be located outside the cultural and
racial boundaries of the nation. Rather than attesting to the absorption of cultural difference into the universality of the
national political sphere as the “model minority” stereotype would dictate, the Asian immigrant — at odds with the cultural, racial,
and linguistic form of the nation — emerges in a site that defers and displaces the temporality of assimilation. 11 This distance from
the national culture constitutes Asian American culture as an alternative formation that produces cultural expressions materially and
aesthetically at odds with the resolution of the citizen in the nation. Rather than expressing a “failed” integration of Asians into the
American cultural sphere, this distance preserves Asian American culture as an alternative site where the palimpsest of lost
memories is reinvented, historiesare fractured and retraced, and the unlike varieties of silence emerge into
articulacy. 12 Hence, Asian American culture emerges out of the contradictions of Asian
immigration, which in the last century and a half of Asian entry into the United States have placed Asians “within” the United
States nation-state, its workplaces, and its markets, yet linguistically, culturally, and racially marked Asians as “foreign” and
“outside” the national polity. 13 Under
such contradictions, late nineteenth-century Chinese
immigrants labored in mining, agriculture, and railroad construction but were excluded from
citizenship and political participation in the state. 14 The contradiction of immigration and
citizenship took a different but consistently resonant form during World War II, when United
States-born Japanese Americans were nominally recognized as citizens and hence recruited
into the United States military, yet were dispossessed [End Page 10] of freedoms and
properties explicitly granted to citizens, officially condemned as “racial enemies,” and
interned in camps throughout the western United States. 15 Philippine immigration after the
period of United States colonization animates yet another kind of contradiction. For Filipino
immigrants, modes of capitalist incorporation and acculturation into American life begin not
at the moment of immigration, but rather in the “homeland” already deeply affected by
United States influences and modes of social organization.
Asking the question “is China a threat” in the first place creates a “us” vs
“them” paradigm that increases security conflict – turns case
Pomeroy 15 (Caleb - Postgraduate Student at University College London - NASA Langley
Research Center. “Discursively Constructing a Space Threat: ‘China Threat’ and U.S. Security”, E-
International Relations Student, http://www.e-ir.info/2015/06/06/discursively-constructing-a-
space-threat-china-threat-u-s-security/)
The question of whether or not China’s reemergence is threatening to U.S. security interests is
discursively constructed to threaten the U.S. The possible answers to this question lead to conflict; answering that
China is threatening could lead to a security dilemma—a situation where the U.S.’s attempts to heighten its own security could
evoke similar defensive responses from China, increasing the risk of conflict (Glaser, 1997). Defense analysts cite China’s emerging
threat in space as a primary reason for the U.S. to weaponize space. However, Hui Zhang of Harvard’s Kennedy School (2008, p. 31)
asserts “U.S. space weaponization plans will have disastrous consequences for international security and the peaceful use of outer
space.” She concludes that this would evoke appropriate defense measures by China, which could lead to a space arms race (Zhang,
2008, p. 40). Given this question’s discursive construction, answering that China is a threat to U.S. security
interests could cause a security dilemma that heightens the risk of conflict. On the other hand, if
one answers that China is not a threat, the U.S. risks becoming ambivalent and could face an
increasing perceived threat from China. U.S. Air Force General William Shelton explains that U.S. military satellites
are effectively defenseless, and an attack would severely limit the U.S.’s civil, commercial, and military capabilities (“U.S. military
satellites,” 2014). A report on the People’s Liberation Army’s space strategy published by the American Enterprise Institute (Wortzel,
2007) concludes that evidence exists that the PLA is preparing as though they might have to militarily engage the U.S. in space, citing
weapons tests, legal justifications, and PLA literature as evidence. The report argues that justifications exist for the U.S. to develop
space weapons systems, whether for defensive measures or offensive capabilities in future space conflicts. If the U.S. becomes
ambivalent while China develops space arms, a U.S. perception of a China threat in space could increase as China becomes better
armed relative to the U.S. Yet, as Zhang (2008) argues, arming space will likely evoke a military response from China. Therefore, even
answering this essay’s question of a possible China threat in the affirmative or negative increases the risk of conflict. This
question’s discursive construction forces the use of the terms “U.S.” and “China,” creating a
“Self” and “Other” paradigm which places the two states in opposition; the debate over
whether or not China is a threat to U.S. security interests is often expressed in the U.S. by using the
language of America as “us” and China as “them.” Jisheng Sun (2014) argues that previously, when China was
considered an ideological partner, such as under the Nationalist Government of Chiang Kai-shek, U.S.
policymakers used the term “we” to describe the two states. When referring to China’s rise today, China is often
referred to as the “Other,” in comparison to the “Self” of the U.S. The “Other” portrays the “U.S.-
imposed ideological dichotomy between itself and China, identifying the latter as different
and even contradictory to the U.S.” (Sun, 2014, p. 87). The policy discourse of the “Self” and “Other ”
simplifies and polarizes and can increase the speed and intensity of security dilemma dynamics between the U.S. and
China (Johnston, 2013). This language creates American unipolarity where China’s threat reputation leads to out-group status,
which in turn fuels perceptions of China as threatening . Intensifying threat perception increases a possible
security dilemma, and security-conscious Chinese political elites are acutely aware of the security costs of dangerous foreign
attributions to China’s character (Deng, 2006, p. 187). The
“Self” versus “Other” paradigm distances
Washington from Beijing and discursively places the two states in opposition .
Chinese threat construction is a fabrication used to protect Western identity

Turner 13 (Oliver, Research Associate at the Brooks World Poverty Institute at the University
of Manchester and author of American Images of China: Identity, Power, Policy, “‘Threatening’
China and US security: the international politics of identity,” Review of International Studies,
http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0260210512000599)
The modern day China ‘threat’ to the United States is not an unproblematic, neutrally verifiable phenomenon. It is an
imagined construction of American design and the product of societal representations which, to
a significant extent, have established the truth that a ‘rising’ China endangers US security . This is
an increasingly acknowledged, but still relatively under-developed, concept within the literature.121 The purpose of this article has
been to expose how ‘threats’
from China towards the U nited States have always been contingent
upon subjective interpretation. The three case studies chosen represent those moments across the lifetime of Sino-US
relations at which China has been perceived as most threatening to American security. The ‘threats’ emerged in highly contrasting
eras. The nature of each was very different and they emerged from varying sources (broadly speaking, from immigration in the
nineteenth century and from ‘great power’ rivalry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries). Yet in this way they most effectively
demonstrate how China ‘threats’ have repeatedly existed as socially constructed phenomenon .
Collectively they reveal the consistent centrality of understandings about the United States in perceptions of external danger. They
demonstrate that, regardless
of China’s ability to assert material force or of the manner in which it
has been seen to impose itself upon the United States, the reality of danger can be
manufactured and made real. China ‘threats’ have always been threats to American identity so
that the individual sources of ‘danger’ – whether a nuclear capability or an influx of (relatively few) foreign immigrants
– have never been the sole determining factors . As James Der Derian notes, danger can be ascribed to
otherness wherever it may be found.122 During the mid-to-late nineteenth century and throughout the early Cold
War, perceptions of China ‘threats’ provoked crises of American identity . The twenty-first-century China
‘threat’ is yet to be understood in this way but it remains inexplicable in simple material terms. As ever, the physical realities of
China are important but they are interpreted in such a way to make them threatening, regardless of Beijing’s intentions. Most
importantly, this article has shown how processes
of representation have been complicit at every stage of
the formulation, enactment, and justification of US China policy. Their primary purpose has been
to dislocate China’s identity from that of the U nited States and introduce opportunities for
action. Further, those policies themselves have reaffirmed the discourses of separation and
difference which make China foreign from the U nited States, protecting American identity from
the imagined threat. Ultimately, this analysis has sought to expose the inadequacy of
approaches to the study of US China policy which privilege and centralise material forces to the
extent that ideas are subordinated or even excluded. Joseph Nye argues that the China Threat Theory
has the potential to become a self-fulfilling prophecy . Based upon a crude hypothetical assumption that there
exists a 50 per cent chance of China becoming aggressive and a 50 per cent chance of it not, Nye explains, to treat China as an
enemy now effectively discounts 50 per cent of the future.123 In
such way he emphasises the ideational
constitution of material forces and the power of discourse to create selected truths about the
world so that certain courses of action are enabled while others are precluded . Assessments such as
those of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper in March 2011 should therefore not only be considered misguided, but also
potentially dangerous. For while they appear to represent authoritative statements of fact they actually rely upon subjective
assumptions about China and the material capabilities he describes. In late 2010 President Obama informed Chinese Premier Wen
Jiabao that ‘the American people [want] to continue to build a growing friendship and strong relationship between the peoples of
China and the United States’.124 The hope, of course, is that a peaceful and cooperative future can be secured. Following the
announcement that the Asia Pacific is to constitute the primary focus of Washington’s early twenty-first-century foreign policy
strategy, American interpretations of China must be acknowledged as a central force within an increasingly pertinent relationship.
The basis of their relations will always be fundamentally constituted by ideas and history
informs us that particular American discourses of China have repeatedly served to construct
vivid and sometimes regrettable realities about that country and its people . Crucially, it tells us that they
have always been inextricable from the potentialities of US China policy. As Sino-US relations become increasingly
consequential the intention must be for American representations of the PRC – and indeed
Chinese representations of the United States – to become the focus of more concerted scholarly
attention. Only in this way can the contours of those relations be more satisfactorily
understood, so that the types of historical episodes explored in this analysis might somehow be
avoided in the future.
The US uses the paradigm of China as a threat to justify its need to dominate. In
reality empirics prove strong military does not lead to conflict, China is
multifaceted and really working together as equals is probably a better
solution.
Pan 4—prof school of international and political studies, Deakin U. PhD in pol sci and IR.
(Chengxin, “The "China threat" in American self-imagination: the discursive construction of
other as power politics,” 1 June 2004, http://www.articlearchives.com/asia/northern-asia-
china/796470-1.html)
Having examined how the "China threat" literature is enabled by and serves the purpose of a
particular U.S. self-construction, I want to turn now to the issue of how this literature
represents a discursive construction of other, instead of an "objective" account of Chinese
reality. This, I argue, has less to do with its portrayal of China as a threat per se than with its
essentialization and totalization of China as an externally knowable object, independent of
historically contingent contexts or dynamic international interactions . In this sense, the
discursive construction of China as a threatening other cannot be detached from (neo)realism,
a positivist, ahistorical framework of analysis within which global life is reduced to endless
interstate rivalry for power and survival. As many critical IR scholars have noted, (neo)realism is not a transcendent description of global reality but is predicated
on the modernist Western identity, which, in the quest for scientific certainty, has come to define itself essentially as the sovereign territorial nation-state. This realist self-identity of Western states leads to the
constitution of anarchy as the sphere of insecurity, disorder, and war. In an anarchical system, as (neo)realists argue, "the gain of one side is often considered to be the loss of the other," (45) and "All other states
are potential threats." (46) In order to survive in such a system, states inevitably pursue power or capability. In doing so, these realist claims represent what R. B. J. Walker calls "a specific historical articulation of
As Kurt
relations of universality/particularity and self/Other." (47) The (neo)realist paradigm has dominated the U.S. IR discipline in general and the U.S. China studies field in particular.
Campbell notes, after the end of the Cold War, a whole new crop of China experts "are much
more likely to have a background in strategic studies or international relations than China
itself." (48) As a result, for those experts to know China is nothing more or less than to
undertake a geopolitical analysis of it, often by asking only a few questions such as how China
will "behave" in a strategic sense and how it may affect the regional or global balance of
power, with a particular emphasis on China's military power or capabilities. As Thomas J. Christensen notes,
"Although many have focused on intentions as well as capabilities, the most prevalent component of the [China threat] debate is the assessment of China's overall future military power compared with that of the
Consequently, almost by default, China emerges as an absolute

United States and other East Asian regional powers." (49)
other and a threat thanks to this (neo)realist prism. The (neo)realist emphasis on survival and security in international relations dovetails perfectly
with the U.S. self-imagination, because for the United States to define itself as the indispensable nation in a world of anarchy is often to demand absolute security. As James Chace and Caleb Carr note, "for over
two centuries the aspiration toward an eventual condition of absolute security has been viewed as central to an effective American foreign policy." (50) And this self-identification in turn leads to the definition of
not only "tangible" foreign powers but global contingency and uncertainty per se as threats. For example, former U.S. President George H. W. Bush repeatedly said that "the enemy [of America] is unpredictability.
The enemy is instability." (51) Similarly, arguing for the continuation of U.S. Cold War alliances, a high-ranking Pentagon official asked, "if we pull out, who knows what nervousness will result?" (52) Thus
understood, by its very uncertain character, China would now automatically constitute a threat to the United States. For example, Bernstein and Munro believe that "China's political unpredictability, the always-
present possibility that it will fall into a state of domestic disunion and factional fighting," constitutes a source of danger. (53) In like manner, Richard Betts and Thomas Christensen write: If the PLA [People's
Liberation Army] remains second-rate, should the world breathe a sigh of relief? Not entirely.... Drawing China into the web of global interdependence may do more to encourage peace than war, but it cannot
guarantee that the pursuit of heartfelt political interests will be blocked by a fear of economic consequences.... U.S. efforts to create a stable balance across the Taiwan Strait might deter the use of force under
) The upshot, therefore, is that since China displays no absolute certainty

certain circumstances, but certainly not all. (54
for peace, it must be, by definition, an uncertainty, and hence, a threat. In the same way, a
multitude of other unpredictable factors (such as ethnic rivalry, local insurgencies,
overpopulation, drug trafficking, environmental degradation, rogue states, the spread of
weapons of mass destruction, and international terrorism) have also been labeled as "threats"
to U.S. security. Yet, it seems that in the post-Cold War environment, China represents a kind of uncertainty par excellence. "Whatever the prospects for a more peaceful, more democratic, and
more just world order, nothing seems more uncertain today than the future of post-Deng China," (55) argues Samuel Kim. And such an archetypical uncertainty is
crucial to the enterprise of U.S. self-construction, because it seems that only an uncertainty
with potentially global consequences such as China could justify U.S. indispensability or its
continued world dominance. In this sense, Bruce Cumings aptly suggested in 1996 that China (as a threat) was basically "a metaphor for an enormously expensive Pentagon that
has lost its bearings and that requires a formidable 'renegade state' to define its mission (Islam is rather vague, and Iran lacks necessary weights)." (56) It is mainly on the basis of this self-fashioning that many U.S.
scholars have for long claimed their "expertise" on China. For example, from his observation (presumably on Western TV networks) of the Chinese protest against the U.S. bombing of their embassy in Belgrade in
May 1999, Robert Kagan is confident enough to speak on behalf of the whole Chinese people, claiming that he knows "the fact" of "what [China] really thinks about the United States." That is, "they consider the
United States an enemy--or, more precisely, the enemy.... How else can one interpret the Chinese government's response to the bombing?" he asks, rhetorically. (57) For Kagan, because the Chinese "have no
other information" than their government's propaganda, the protesters cannot rationally "know" the whole event as "we" do. Thus, their anger must have been orchestrated, unreal, and hence need not be taken
seriously. (58) Given that Kagan heads the U.S. Leadership Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and is very much at the heart of redefining the United States as the benevolent global
hegemon, his confidence in speaking for the Chinese "other" is perhaps not surprising. In a similar vein, without producing in-depth analysis, Bernstein and Munro invoke with great ease such all-encompassing
notions as "the Chinese tradition" and its "entire three-thousand-year history." (59) In particular, they repeatedly speak of what China's "real" goal is: "China is an unsatisfied and ambitious power whose goal is to
dominate Asia.... China aims at achieving a kind of hegemony.... China is so big and so naturally powerful that [we know] it will tend to dominate its region even if it does not intend to do so as a matter of national
policy." (60) Likewise, with the goal of absolute security for the United States in mind, Richard Betts and Thomas Christensen argue: The truth is that China can pose a grave problem even if it does not become a
military power on the American model, does not intend to commit aggression, integrates into a global economy, and liberalizes politically. Similarly, the United States could face a ¶ dangerous conflict over Taiwan
even if it turns out that Beijing lacks the capacity to conquer the island.... This is true because of geography; because of America's reliance on alliances to project power; and because of China's capacity to harm
By now, it seems clear that neither

U.S. forces, U.S. regional allies, and the American homeland, even while losing a war in the technical, military sense. (61)
China's capabilities nor intentions really matter . Rather, almost by its mere geographical
existence, China has been qualified as an absolute strategic "other," a discursive construct
from which it cannot escape. Because of this, "China" in U.S. IR discourse has been objectified
and deprived of its own subjectivity and exists mainly in and for the U.S. self. Little wonder
that for many U.S. China specialists, China becomes merely a "national security concern" for
the United States, with the "severe disproportion between the keen attention to China as a
security concern and the intractable neglect of China's [own] security concerns in the current
debate." (62) At this point, at issue here is no longer whether the "China threat" argument is
true or false, but is rather its reflection of a shared positivist mentality among mainstream
China experts that they know China better than do the Chinese themselves. (63) "We" alone
can know for sure that they consider "us" their enemy and thus pose a menace to "us." Such
an account of China, in many ways, strongly seems to resemble Orientalists' problematic
distinction between the West and the Orient. Like orientalism, the U.S. construction of the
Chinese "other" does not require that China acknowledge the validity of that dichotomous
construction. Indeed, as Edward Said point out, "It is enough for 'us' to set up these distinctions in our own minds; [and] 'they' become 'they' accordingly." (64) It may be the case that there is
nothing inherently wrong with perceiving others through one's own subjective lens. Yet, what is problematic with mainstream U.S. China
watchers is that they refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of the inherent fluidity of Chinese
identity and subjectivity and try instead to fix its ambiguity as absolute difference from "us," a
kind of certainty that denotes nothing but otherness and threats. As a result, it becomes
difficult to find a legitimate space for alternative ways of understanding an inherently volatile,
amorphous China (65) or to recognize that China's future trajectory in global politics is
contingent essentially on how "we" in the United States and the West in general want to see
it as well as on how the Chinese choose to shape it. (66) Indeed, discourses of "us" and "them" are always closely linked to how "we" as "what
we are" deal with "them" as "what they are" in the practical realm. This is exactly how the discursive strategy of perceiving China as a threatening other should be understood, a point addressed in the following
section, which explores some of the practical dimension of this discursive strategy in the containment perspectives and hegemonic ambitions of U.S. foreign policy.
Conditional immigration
Conditioning the immigration of Asians, refies the refugee condition, a
paradoxical relationship that forever indebts the alien to the settler state to
only be staved by the production of one’s own labor.
Day 16, Specialization:Asian American literature and visual culture, Critical Ethnic Studies,
Bringing the context of migration more explicitly into conversation with the theme of settler
colonial inhospitality evoked by Lum’s furniture sculptures, Bobby Ngu’s character exemplifies
the sense of homelessness that results from his indebtedness to the promise of the American
Dream. He is described as “always working. Hustling. Moving.”73 Although he owns his home and business, it isn’t
enough: “Can’t explain. Happier he is, harder he works. Can’t stop. Gotta make money. Provide
for his family. Gotta buy his wife nice clothes. Gotta buy his kid the best. Bobby’s kid’s gonna
know the good life. That’s how Bobby sees it.” His blind faith in the American Dream is the
reason he doesn’t understand his wife Rafaela’s labor activism. He cannot understand why she joined
Justice for Janitors or why she’s complaining. His attitude illustrates the paradox of Mimi Nguyen’s description of the
“refugee condition,” as a figure who is both “a target and also an instrument for the gift of
freedom”74 and embodies an “existential condition of suspension or surrender.”75 He
suspends thinking and surrenders to work: Always working. Washing dishes. Chopping
vegetables. Cleaning floors. Cooking hamburgers. Painting walls. Laying brick. Cutting hedges.
Mowing lawn. Digging ditches. Sweeping trash. Fixing pipes. Pumping toilets. Scrubbing
urinals. Washing clothes. Pressing clothes. Sewing clothes. Planting trees. Changing tires.
Changing oil and filters. Stocking shelves. Lifting sacks. Loading trucks. Smashing trash.
Recycling plastic. Recycling aluminum. Recycling cans and glass. Drilling asphalt. Pouring
cement. Building up. Tearing down. Fixing up. Cleaning up. Keeping up. 76 But as Nguyen powerfully
exposes, the “gift of freedom” is itself bound up in power through the ways “liberal empire
marshals its forces for and against others and elsewhere.” 77 In Bobby’s case, it is a looming sense of
unrepayable debt that defines American citizenship and freedom : “Gotta be happy he’s alive
in America. Saved by the Americans. New country. New life. Working hard to make it.
American through and through. . . . Doing America a favor. Doing his
duty.”78 Demonstrating the inseparability of debt from the gift of freedom that Bobby expresses through his endless
workdays, Nguyen writes, “The gift of freedom emerges as a site at which modern governmentality and its politics of life (and death)
unfolds as a universal history of the human, and the figuration of debt surfaces as those imperial remains
that preclude the subject of freedom from being able to escape a colonial order of things.” 79 It
is out of racial debt that he cannot stop consuming, stop working, stop moving.
Corporate Orientalism
The aff’s blueprint of the East results in a form of corporate orientalism;
resulting in unequal power dynamisa dn western domination
Jouhki 6 Jukka Jouhki currently works as a Senior Lecturer of Anthropology at the Department
of History and Ethnology, University of Jyväskylä. Jouhki is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Human
Technology journal
Orientalism and india (3-4)//SP
Orientalism, for Said, is ”a kind of Western projection onto and will to govern over the Orient.”
Orientalists, he claims, have plotted their narratives about the history, character, and destiny of
the Orient for centuries but in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the geographical vastness
of the Orient had shrunk, the discipline had expanded with colonialism, and ”Orientalism had
accomplished its selfmetamorphosis from a scholarly discourse to an imperial institution.” There
was a new, positive, twist to Orientalism: ”since one cannot ontologically obliterate the Orient [...], one does have the means to
capture it, treat it, describe it, improve it, radically alter it.” (Ibid., 94–95.) Although Said’s view on Orientalism has been criticized as
monolithic (See e.g. Clarke 1997, 9–10; Dawn 1979; Lele 1994, 45–47 & Kopf 1980, 498–499), Said obviously sees many
variations and modes in the ways Europeans have constructed the Orient. In his most general
division, Said distinguishes between academic, general and corporate Orientalisms. In academic
Orientalism, ”[a]nyone who teaches, writes about or researches the Orient […] is an Orientalist,
and what he or she does is Orientalism.” Said believes that academically Orientalism still lives on as congresses are
held and books are written with the Orient as their focus and the Orientalists as their authority. Doctrines and theses are
still being produced with the Orient or the Oriental as their subject. As a style of thought,
Orientalism draws on the epistemological and ontological distinction between the Orient and
the Occident. In general Orientalism, a large mass of writers (of prose, poetry, political theory
etc.) like Hugo, Dante and Marx have accepted the East–West distinction as a foundation in their
theories, themes and descriptions of the Orient and its people. There is certain kind of exchange between
academic and general Orientalism, and Said suggests that the exchange has been disciplined or even regulated. Finally, corporate
Orientalism is materially and historically more defined than the other two meanings of Orientalism. Corporate
Orientalism
is the way Europe has ruled the Orient, and also how the Orient has been stated about,
reviewed and taught institutionally. This is as significant part of the ”Western style for
dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” (Said 1995, 2–3.) [7] Said also makes a
distinction between latent and manifest Orientalism. Manifest Orientalism has been comprised of ”the
various stated views about Oriental society, languages, literatures, history, sociology etc.”
whereas latent Orientalism has been more stable, unanimous and durable mode of thought [8]. In manifest Orientalism, the
differences between Orientalist writers, their personal style and form of writing have been explicit, but the basic content of their
writing, ”the separatedness of the Orient, its eccentricity, its backwardness, its silent indifference, its feminine penetrability, its
supine malleability” has reflected the more or less unified latent Orientalism. Moreover, latent Orientalism and race classifications
have supporter each other very well, especially in the nineteenth century. The ”second-order Darwinism,” of Orientalism has
seemed to justify division of races to backward and advanced, and further, using a binary typology, to backward and advanced
cultures and societies. The lesser civilizations have been thought to have suffered from the limitations caused by the biological
composition of their race. Hence they have been seen as in need of moral-political admonishment and even colonization by
Europeans. The Orientalist discourse has been highly similar to the discourse approaching the delinquents, the insane, the women
and the poor within Europe. They all have been deemed lamentably alien . As other marginalized people, the
Orientals have been seen through (not looked at) and analyzed as problems (not as citizens), or confined or taken over. As Said
states, whenever something was designated as Oriental, the act included an evaluative
judgment. ”Since the Oriental was a member of a subject race, he had to be subjected […].” (Ibid., 206–207.)
Cyber threat
The aff’s description of china’s cyber power are orientalist and reminiscent of
the west’s fascination with eastern weaponry and philosophy.
Inkster 16, Nigel Inkster has worked at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS)
since 2007. His current title is Director of Future Conflict and Cyber Security. His research
portfolio at IISS has included transnational terrorism, insurgency, transnational organised crime,
cyber security, intelligence and security and the evolving character of conflict. He has written
and broadcast on all these topics and has also been engaged in a variety of para-diplomatic
activities on behalf of the UK government including leading a Sino-UK Track 1.5 Cyber Security
Dialogue. http://www.iiss.org/en/publications/adelphi/by%20year/2016-d199/china--39-s-
cyber-power-f1db/ap456-05-chapter-3-6229 NW SP
If there is one aspect of China’s rise that has created widespread apprehension, it is the country’s evolution into a significant military
power. The development of China’s armed forces since the early 1990s has been dramatic. Once reliant on a low-tech, mass-
mobilisation land army designed primarily for a People’s War, China has begun to attain major naval, air, space
and nuclear capabilities, and is rapidly acquiring the capacity to project force beyond its
borders and traditional sphere of influence. The cyber domain has been a critical factor in this evolution
and, as is true for other facets of China’s development, is widely regarded as a determinant of how the
country will fight future wars. Understanding the precise role that cyber capabilities will play is by no means easy. As
Anthony Cordesman has observed, ‘China does not make publicly available a unified, single doctrine for guiding military
operations.’1 However, there
is a hierarchy of official documentation that provides insight into
Chinese military thinking, starting with a series of biennial defence White Papers that, although they lack specificity, give
an indication of overall aims and direction. These are supplemented by articles in the journals of military think tanks such as the
Academy of Military Science, official newspapers such as the Liberation Army Daily and the writings of serving and retired military
officers. In assessing the cyber capabilities of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), it is important to consider China’s view of the place
of warfare in statecraft, and how that view might determine the ways in which these new-found capabilities will be used .
Foreign
analysts of China’s military strategy are often preoccupied with the issue of whether it is broadly analogous
to that of the country’s main comparator, the United States, or qualitatively different due to the influence of traditional
Chinese military thinking – requiring a different kind of analysis from those who seek to
counter it. There are dangers associated with both approaches. Mirror-imaging by policymakers – assuming that an adversary
will invariably interpret events and make decisions in a similar manner to oneself, or what used to be referred to in the British
Foreign and Commonwealth Office as the ‘Wykehamist fallacy’ – has a long track record of failure, as Percy Cradock illustrates in his
history of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee, Know Your Enemy.2 Equally,
an Orientalist view of Chinese
military strategists as philosophising Go masters steeped in the traditions of Sunzi and other
classical Chinese writers on strategy is likely to be just as misleading. At the same time, it is hard to
imagine that an intellectual and cultural tradition developed over more than 2,000 years has not left some mark, and it is therefore
worth briefly examining what that tradition actually amounts to.
The aff’s discourse on technology, capitalism and knowledge enforces the

domination of western culture and creates an orientalist image of eastern
nations.
Yiu 09, Martha Cheung Pui Yiu. Martha Pui Yiu Cheung ( Chinese: 張佩瑤; 1953–2013) was a
researcher and scholar in Translation Studies, Chair Professor in Translation[1] and Director
of the Centre for Translation at Hong Kong Baptist University.[2] She is best known for the
first volume of her Anthology on Chinese Discourse on Translation, published in 2006. She was
working on the second volume of the anthology at the time of her death. Professor Cheung was
a leading scholar in the internationalisation of Translation Studies, drawing attention to the
Eurocentric focus of the discipline and helping to raise the profile of Chinese translation theory.
The Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities awards the Martha Cheung Book Prize in
Translation each year in her honour. Chinese Discourses on Translation: Positions and
Perspectives (Translator S) (261-262) SP
Whether we accept it or not, the world we live in has been transformed beyond recognition.
Goods, capital, people, knowledge, fashion, information, images, crimes, terrorism,
pollutants, cultural, virtual (‘cyber-spatial’) and psychological boundaries. Arjun Appadurai (1990
characterizes these various kinds of flows as ethnoscape (flow of people), technoscape (flow of
technology), finanscape (flow of capital), mediascape (flow of images), and ideoscape (flow of
ideas). These five dimensions of global culture have produced a macro-politics of new
hegemonic and imperialist desires through which Western-based discourses are increasingly
shaping the cultural formations and spaces of non-Western societies . The net effect of this globalizing
phenomenon is the creation of a new semiotic, cultural and discoursive empire that is largely
dominated by developed Western countries, especially the United state s (Mao 2003). Textualties and
visualities, mostly Western are inserted into circuits of multiple discourses, both to promote a voracious
consumption of ideas and images and to generate a transnationlized memory for the global
village which continues to thrive on both consensus and conflicts . A significant part of this globalizes
memory is created and maintained in the linguistic and cultural space of visual products such as television, film and advertising.
DACA
The representation of DACA by the media is a form of hegemonic discourse – a
discourse postulated off of Orientalism, the misrepresentation migrant through
discourse to create a skewed reality
Gustaveson 18, (A nation of immigrants : DACA, migrant precarity, and the national
imagination), Spring 2018, https://arminda.whitman.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1434&context=theses jl
In other words, themedia plays a particularly important role in the (re)production and management of
consent. Paying close attention to the ways in which the non-coercive power of consent is secured in the media is a crucial part of
understanding how discourses become dominant. However, Gramscian hegemony and Foucauldian discourse
seem to be at odds conceptually. After all, Foucault holds that discourse produces what is real, collapsing any
distinction between representation and practice. If we take Foucault seriously, then a Gramscian ideology critique – that is, a focus
on misrepresentations of what is real – becomes hard to reconcile. Where do we draw the line between what is real and what is
misrepresented? Can we work with both theorists at once? Edward Said’s work on Orientalist discourse serves as
an exemplar for pulling these two different theorists together . Said begins Orientalism by citing Foucault:
Without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously
systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage – and even produce – the
Orient...[and the corresponding] limitations on thought and action imposed by Orientalism (Said 1979, 3). Analyzing Orientalism
as a discourse illuminates a great deal. Said sees Foucauldian discourse as a useful framework for understanding the otherwise
confounding “internal consistency” of Orientalism. He writes, “Orientalism as I study it here deals principally...with the internal
consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient...despite..any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a ‘real’ Orient” (Said
1979, 5). Elsewhere, Said notes the
“wide space” opened up by certain “truths” postulated within
Orientalist discourse, alluding to the Foucauldian notion of discourse as a productive social phenomenon (Said 1979, 15).
Said also cites Gramsci as part of his analytic approach. He is especially interested in understanding how Orientalism operates
through a Gramscian notion of consent to become hegemonic. He writes,
“[It is] the result of cultural hegemony at
work that gives Orientalism the durability and the strength I have been speaking about so far...a
collective notion identifying ‘us’ Europeans as against all ‘those’ non- Europeans” (Said 1979, 7). In
this way, Said conceptualizes Orientalism as a “hegemonic discourse.” Indeed, it is precisely by employing
Gramsci’s notion of consent that Said is able to puzzle through the ways in which Orientalism is hegemonic both inside and outside
of Europe. Gramsci provides Said with the tools to denaturalize common sense portrayals of the Orient. Said goes on, “The
imaginative examination of things Oriental was based...exclusively upon a sovereign Western consciousness out of whose
unchallenged centrality an Oriental world emerged” (Said 1979, 8, my emphasis). Here, his work is to think through how Orientalism
maintains itself as a relatively unchallenged, common sense ideological representation of the Orient, a Gramscian task.
Orientalism as a discourse exhibits the productive limitations to thought and imagination
highlighted by Foucault, with their corresponding real effects . At the same time, it exists as a common sense
ideological representation of the Orient, a product of socio-political imagination. It makes certain kinds of claims intelligible and
certain kinds of reality legible, while occluding others. Holding Gramsci and Foucault together, Said is able to critique the ways that
Orientalist discourse misrepresents the Orient, all while suggesting that Orientalism constitutes important elements of reality.
Following Said, I
approach DACA coverage in the New York Times as a “hegemonic discourse,” calling
attention to the misrepresentations of migrant and nation that abound in the newspaper,
while also recognizing that the discourse constitutes a real nation-migrant experience. It is, to
borrow Said’s phrase, “something more formidable than a mere collection of lies ” (Said 1979, 6).
Disease
The aff uses the perception of the threat of disease as a justification for further
exclusionary politics,
Cook 10, Alethia, (Title: Associate Professor, Department Chair & Director Security Studies
(Ph.D., Kent State University)) Cook, Alethia (2010) "Securitization of Disease in the United
States: Globalization, Public Policy, and Pandemics," Risk, Hazards & Crisis in Public Policy: Vol. 1:
Iss. 1, Article 3. DOI: 10.2202/1944-4079.1019
http://www.psocommons.org/wmhp/vol1/iss1/art3 // li cao. gw
From a securitization perspective, the threat of pandemic would best be seen as a multisectoral
threat. The spread of disease would have an impact on the economic sector as people changed
their behaviors and avoided public gatherings (or were ordered to curtail them), endured
quarantines, avoided travel, and were absent from work. According to the WHO, estimates of
the economic impact of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2003
range from $10 to $30 billion (World Health Organization 2005a, b). Disease could also become
an existential threat to other sectors, including the military (if, for instance, marshal law were
implemented to impose quarantines), the political (if the interstate spread of the disease
brought states into conflict over the freedom of states to make decisions about travel and
disease spread—sovereignty might also be challenged if the public lost confidence in their
government due to the handling of the pandemic), and the social (if the identity of groups were
undermined by the threat of the disease). Evidence of the multi-sectoral aspect of the disease
and the complications associated with it is found in a recent governmental exercise. Black Ice
was an international bioterrorism exercise. There are no major differences between
bioterrorism and a naturally occurring pandemic aside from the initiation of the spread of the
disease. The After Action Report on the exercise indicated that one of the critical issues
identified was that there was a clear divergence between players working in security and those
in public health. The Report indicated that this highlighted the need for greater international
engagement among these sectors in order to address these problems more effectively in the
future (U.S. Department of State 2006: 1+13). In general, the globalized world of today poses a
significant threat for the spread of disease. In particular, the ease of air travel makes it possible
for diseases to disseminate broadly in a short period of time (Pavia 2007). As early as 2000, the
U.S. Government was beginning to identify pandemic as a threat to national security. A
National Intelligence Estimate on global infectious disease was released by the National
Intelligence Council in 2000, which declared it would “consider the national security dimension
of a nontraditional threat [global infectious disease]” (National Intelligence Council 2000, 33). In
2006, Sam Nunn stated that “the fight against infectious diseases around the world must
become a key component of America’s national security” (Nunn 2006). In spite of government’s
concern, it seems that the American public remains more concerned about the cost and
availability of health care than about the spread of infectious diseases. According to a study that
analyzed public opinion about a variety of diseases across many different polls: polls show that
Americans’ attention to news coverage [about avian flu, SARS, West Nile virus, and anthrax]
seemed to be event driven, peaking when there were new human or animal cases, and
decreasing rapidly when the diseases seemed to be contained. Americans’ perceptions of
threats were usually the highest in the early stages of major outbreaks. The public became more
complacent when the outbreaks seemed to be under control (Ho et al. 2007, 1). In addition to
this analysis, the Gallup Poll Top Perceived U.S. Health Problem survey provides evidence of a
lack of concern in America. Since 2000, the public responses to open-ended questions about the
perceived most urgent health care issue facing America today have focused on cost and access.
These two issues were mentioned by 56% of Americans in 2007 (Saad 2007). From 1987 to 1999,
the top response was HIV/AIDS, with cost receiving the second-highest percentage of responses.
However, concerns about HIV/AIDS have been on the decline since then (Jones 2003). Overall,
these poll results would seem to indicate that people are more concerned about their ability to
afford and have access to health care, regardless of their ailment. There have been cases,
however, where it seemed that government could have made (or did make) attempts to
securitize diseases. The remainder of this section evaluates major disease cases in the recent
past for evidence of attempted securitization. The properties of diseases have the potential to
make some more threatening than others. In particular, those that are readily transmissible
among humans, it would seem, would be perceived as more threatening than those that are
not. These include HIV/AIDS, pandemic influenza, and SARS. Additional research was
conducted on extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB), heart disease, obesity, West
Nile virus, and cancer. Although some traditional security terms (such as crisis, deadly killer,
global emergency) were found to be used in reference to these afflictions, there was no case
found where the word security was applied by an elite actor .
Hegemony (Hypersexualization)
Western imperialistic exploitation justifies the hypersexualization of the Asian
woman, thus subjecting their bodies to physical and psychological violence
Sunny Woan, ’08, White Sexual Imperialism: A Theory of Asian Feminist Jurisprudence, 14
Wash. & Lee J. Civ. Rts. & Soc. Just. 275. 2008.
http://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/crsj/vol14/iss2/5. AL.
Few mediums reveal the White sexual imperialistic exploitation of Asian women more so than
pornography. 137 In a 2002 study conducted by Jennifer Lynn Gossett and Sarah Byrne, out of thirty-one
pornographic websites that depicted rape or torture of women, more than half showed Asian
women as the rape victim and one-third showed White men as the perpetrator . 138 The study further
uncovered a strong correlation between race and pedophilia, advertising with titles such as "Japanese Schoolgirls" or "Asian
Teens."'139 Furthermore, images of Asian women in pornographic forms consistently came up through
a keyword search for "torture." Many scholars warn that race-specific pornography contributes to race
specific sexual violence. Since the overwhelming majority of violent pornography features Asian
women in particular, it follows that Asian women are at even greater risk of sexual violence due
to their role in violent pornography. Helen Zia, a noted social activist, suggests a direct connection between racial-
sexual stereotyped pornography and actual violence against Asian women. Additionally, Kandice Chuh argues that " because
Asian/American women are depicted as always consenting, they cannot be raped in the eyes of
the law." Pornography leads to other alarming sexual-racial trends involving Asian women as
well. For example, depictions of Filipinas as sexual commodities on the Internet have been linked to the mail-order bride industry
in Australia. Researchers further speculate that online sexual commodification of Filipinas may at least partially explain why
White men's
Filipinas experience disproportionate levels of domestic violence compared to non-Filipina women.'
fascination with Asian women in pornography stems from early nineteenth century Western
imperialism. 147 To colonize the Asian nations, countries such as the United States flooded Asia
with military forces. As an inevitable result of military presence, prostitution centers consisting
of local civilian women sprung up to cater to the White servicemen. With these sexual
experiences as their main, if not only, encounters with Asian women, White servicemen
returned home with the generalization that Asian women are hypersexualized and always
willing to comply with White man's prurient demands.' This germinated even more interest in
Asian women as sexual objects. To sustain this increased interest, the Asian sex tour industry
developed. Asian sex tourism further perpetuates the stereotype of Asian women as
hypersexualized and always willing. If Asian women are perceived as hyper-sexual, it
understandably follows that sexually explicit materials, pornography for example, would include
a preponderance of Asian women. […] Women are sexually assaulted because they are women: not individually or at
random, but on the basis of sex, because of their membership in a group defined by gender. Forty-four percent of women in the
United States have been or will be victims of rape or attempted rape at least once in their lives. Women
of color
experience disproportionately high incidence rates. The dominance approach to feminist theory
frames the question of equality as "a question of the distribution of power. Thus, gender
equality, as a question of power, scrutinizes "male supremacy and female subordination."
Following this logic, racial equality scrutinizes White supremacy and non-White subordination. For the
Asian woman at the intersection of gender and race, achieving equality means overthrowing not
only male supremacy or White supremacy, but specifically White male supremacy. Since "sexuality appears as
the interactive dynamic of gender as an inequality'' and " aggression against those with less
power is experienced as sexual pleasure, an entitlement of masculinity, it is the White male's
sexual dominance over the Asian female which emerges as the source of inequality that the
Asian female suffers. Moreover, for Asian feminist jurisprudence, "colonial and military domination
are interwoven with sexual domination ." The Western military's involvement in Asia, both in colonial
and neo-colonial history, has
led to Asia's sex tourism industry. This is an industry where the buyers of
bodies for sexual pleasure are predominantly White men and the sellers of their bodies for
sexual pleasure are predominantly Asian women. No other fact or condition confirms the
imbalanced power relations between the East and the West . This imbalance of power came from
White men imperializing Asia and, in the course of conquest, the taking of Asian women's bodies
as their spoils. 214 The pervasiveness of sexual objectification establishes in the minds of
Westerners a stereotype of Asian women as hyper-sexualized, since their only utility to
Westerners for centuries come from their sexual submission.2
Human rights
Human rights discourse legitimizes colonial intervention
Mutua 1 (Makau, Professor of Law and Director of the Human Rights Center – State University of New York at Buffalo School of
Law, “Savages, Victims, and Saviors: The Metaphor of Human Rights”, Harvard International Law Journal, Winter, 42 Harv. Int'l L.J.
201, Lexis)
The human rights movement n1 is marked by a damning metaphor. The grand narrative of human rights
contains a subtext that depicts an epochal contest pitting savages, on the one hand, against victims and
saviors, on the other. n2 The savages-victims-saviors (SVS) n3 construction is a three-dimensional compound metaphor in which
each dimension is a metaphor in itself. n4 The main authors of the human rights discourse, n5 including the United Nations,
Western states, international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), n6 and senior Western academics, constructed this three-
dimensional prism. This
rendering of the human rights corpus and its discourse is unidirectional and
predictable, a black-and-white construction that pits good against evil . This Article attempts to elicit from
the proponents of the human rights movement several admissions, some of them deeply unsettling. It asks that human rights
advocates be more self-critical and come to terms with the troubling rhetoric and history that shape, in part, the human rights
movement. At the same time, the Article does not only address the biased and arrogant rhetoric and history of the human rights
enterprise, but also grapples with the contradictions in the basic nobility and majesty that drive the human rights project--the drive
from the unflinching belief that human beings and the political societies they construct can be governed by a higher morality. This
first section briefly introduces the three dimensions of the SVS metaphor and how the metaphor exposes the theoretical flaws of the
current human rights corpus. The first dimension of the
prism depicts a savage and evokes images of
barbarism. The abominations of the savage are presented as so cruel and unimaginable as to represent their state as a negation
of humanity. The human rights story presents the state as the classic savage, an ogre forever bent on the consumption of humans.
n7 Although savagery in human rights discourse connotes much more than the state, thestate is depicted as the
operational instrument of savagery. States become savage when they choke off and oust civil society. n8 The
"good" state controls its demonic proclivities by cleansing itself with, and internalizing, human
rights. The "evil" state, on the other hand, expresses itself through an illiberal, anti-democratic, or other
authoritarian culture. The redemption or salvation of the state is solely dependent on its submission to
human rights norms. The state is the guarantor of human rights; it is also the target and raison d'etre of human rights law.
n9 But the reality is far more complex. While the metaphor may suggest otherwise, it is not the state per se that is barbaric but the
cultural foundation of the state. The state only becomes a vampire when "bad" culture overcomes or disallows the development of
"good" culture. The real savage, though, is not the state but a cultural deviation from human rights. That savagery inheres in the
theory and practice of the one-party state, military junta, controlled or closed state, theocracy, or even cultural practices such as the
one popularly known in the West as female genital mutilation (FGM), n10 not in the state per se. The state itself is a neutral, passive
instrumentality--a receptacle or an empty vessel--that conveys savagery by implementing the project of the savage culture.The
second dimension of the prism depicts the face and the fact of a victim as well as the essence and the idea of victimhood. A human
being whose "dignity and worth" have been violated by the savage is the victim. The
victim figure is a powerless,
helpless innocent whose naturalist attributes have been negated by the primitive and offensive actions of the state or the
cultural foundation of the state. The entire human rights structure is both anti-catastrophic and reconstructive. It is anti-catastrophic
because it is designed to prevent more calamities through the creation of more victims. It is reconstructive because it seeks to re-
engineer the state and the society to reduce the number of victims, as it defines them, n11 and prevent conditions that give rise to
victims. The classic human rights document--the human rights report--embodies these two mutually reinforcing strategies. An INGO
human rights report is usually a catalogue of horrible catastrophes visited on individuals. As a rule, each report also carries a
diagnostic epilogue and recommended therapies and remedies. n12 The third dimension of the prism is the savior or
the redeemer, the good angel who protects, vindicates, civilizes, restrains, and safeguards. The savior is the
victim's bulwark
against tyranny. The simple, yet complex promise of the savior is freedom: freedom from the tyrannies of the state, tradition,
and culture. But it is also the freedom to create a better society based on particular values. In the human rights story, the savior
is the human rights corpus itself, with the United Nations, Western governments, INGOs, and Western charities as the
actual rescuers, redeemers of a benighted world. n13 In reality, however, these institutions are merely fronts .
The savior is ultimately a set of culturally based norms and practices that inhere in liberal
thought and philosophy.
Intellectual Imperialism
Recruiting Asian laborers through immigration policy is a form of intellectual
imperialism, the minds of the east not treated as individuals but rather a labor
force to be exploited sustains the submissive role of the orient
Karcyzynska 12 (Eliza Karczynka- grad student at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań
“Orientalism as Provincial,” Published in Thinking about Provincialism in Thinking, pp 177-195,
Vol 100) RK
we can see parallels between the economic dominance and the state of
According to Syed Hussein Alatas,
science in the countries of the East. Intellectual imperialism, domination of one way of thinking,
functions like economic imperialism . During the colonial period, metropolis treated subordinate territories as a source of raw materials.
Finished products were exported back to the colony. A similar mechanism works nowadays in
intellectual imperialism. The data from this region, the raw data on specific topics are collected and
subsequently processed and manufactured in England in the form of books and articles, and
finally sold here. (S.H. Alatas 2000, p. 25) The researchers from the East thus became a source of
information but not of theories or concepts . Their role is reduced to the transmission of data.
Moreover, there is a change in perception of the image of science . The basic value is the accurate transmission of information
while the creative interpretation of the data is attributed to the scientists of the West. For example, it is
visible in the way that lecturers are employed at Turkish universities. Those researchers who spent at least part of their
career in the centers of the West (mainly in the United States, Great Britain, France) are considered to be more creative and competent, even if the subject of their research is
connected to the history or culture of Turkey. Treating scholars from the East as merely a source of data was practiced in Western research centers as well. During the Cold War,
China was a significant subject of study to the United States. The isolation of the Asian country meant that most of the studies had to be carried out outside of its territory. Thus,
during the period from 1950s to 1980s, many American universities employed highly qualified Chinese scientists, who were predominantly political refugees, as assistants. They
were regarded as specialists in the field of language and culture, and supplied raw data, on which more prominent American researchers conducted their analyses and
The contribution of Chinese scientists was very rarely shown in the final product.
formulated their theories.
This was subsequently reflected in the scientific careers of immigrants from China . Since they were
not treated as creative, independent individual s, usually they could not get promoted to high
positions (Lary 2006, p. 6). There is another feature related to intellectual imperialism. The belief in the backwardness and lower
value of the Orient became a pretext for the West to take a role of a tutor . You can also find a reference here to
economic imperialism. Great Britain and France were not willing to get rid of their colonies and justified it with the claim that these areas were not 188 Eliza Karczy mature
countries of the Orient are believed to be underdeveloped in

enough to reach independence. Similarly, in case of science,
education and research. If you wanted to gain objective knowledge, it was necessary to turn to
the West. It was assumed that people here know less about practically all subjects than people in the West. Once again a parallel exists. In the
past the outlook was that the colonies could not maintain themselves. They could not be
granted independence because they would ruin the country if they govern themselves. They
could not be relied upon to develop the country because they did not have the technical know-
how. Now, the parallel with intellectual imperialism is that they do not have the intellectual know-
how. Hence the need for a form of indirect tutelage . (S.H. Alatas 2000, p. 25) The role of a tutor resulted not only in
unequal division of knowledge (the tutor has a much higher degree of knowledge than the person who is under his tutelage) but also in a
moral commitment to leadership . Intellectual imperialism produces a way of thinking, which Alatas calls Captive Mind. While intellectual
imperialism is imposed from the outside and represents a global approach , the Captive Mind is
self-imposed. How is it characterized? Alatas (2000, p. 37) lists ten characteristics: 1. It is a product of higher institutions of learning, at home or abroad, whose way of
thinking imitates, and is dominated by, Western thought in an uncritical manner. 2. It is uncreative and incapable of raising original problems. 3. Its method of thinking imitates,
and is dominated by, Western thought in an uncritical manner. 4. It is incapable of separating the particular from the universal and consequently fails to adapt the universally
valid corpus of knowledge to the particular local situations. 5. It is fragmented in outlook. 6. It is alienated from the major issues of society. 7. It is separated from its own
intellectual pursuit. 8. It is unconscious of its own captivity and its conditioning factors. 9. It cannot be studied in a quantitative manner but can be studied through empirical
The Captive Mind is provincial in the sense that it is

observation. 10. It is the result of Western dominance upon the rest of the world.
unable to function independently, in case of social sciences it is unable to develop and create
new theories without constantly looking up to the West. The consistent decline of native intellectual
tradition puts scientists in a vacuum, from which the only escape seems to be following the
European thought. Orientalism as a Sign of Provincialism 189 The lack of originality is Alatas main charge against Eastern scholars. A partial explanation for this
there is a lack of communication
situation may be the fact that the social sciences have been imported from outside in a developed form. As a result,
between European knowledge and indigenous ideas and history. Meanwhile, it is not true that there was no social science
in the Orient before the era of colonialism. Syed Farid Alatas cites the example of the Arab thinker Ibn Khaldun living in the second half of the fourteenth century. In his
numerous works, he wrote inter alia about the emergence of civilization, political power and many other issues. He distinguished two levels of knowledge in the historical
sciences and created foundations for the development of social sciences. Unfortunately, nowadays his thought is ignored in studies. For example, there are no attempts to
integrate the ideas of Ibn Khaldun with Western theories. In the countries of the Orient, we can observe a general denial of local history and of
philosophical traditions. This is reminiscent of Abdel- Malek’s claim that the world of the Orient was an object of research. The native tradition of Ibn Khaldun
is merely an object of study, not a source of inspiration or philosophical concepts. This argument is also an extension of Said’s idea its own representation. In the past,
Now things are only slightly better: these traditions are an object of
Orientalists ignored local traditions.
exploration but not a source of knowledge. There is another cause of intellectual imperialism. Funds, technology and prestige are unevenly
distributed in the world of science. In addition, we may talk about a global market of scientific ideas. In this market, the most competitive ideas win, and they are determined by
rhetorical programs.
Iran
Iranian threat construction is based in Orientalism, Islamophobia, and racist
double standards
Izadi & Biria 7 [Foad Izadi & Hakimeh Saghaye-Biria, Comm & Public Affairs @ LSU Baton Rouge, 2007 Journal of Communication Inquiry 31.2, “A Discourse
Analysis of Elite American Newspaper Editorials,”]
The focus of all the editorials revolved around the United States’s responsibility to fight the spread of nuclear weapons to Iran. The
editorials attempted to show that Iran had violated its international obligations under the NPT. The two themes of Oriental
untrustworthiness and Islam as threat appear to function as the ideological underpinning of this
construction of us versus them. Whereas it downplays or denies Iran’s right to all nuclear technology applicable to
peaceful purposes, a most central tenet of the NPT was left outside the editorials’discourse:nuclear disarmament. Under the terms
of the NPT, the five original nuclear powers, who are parties to the NPT, were permitted to keep their nuclear arsenal but pledged to
negotiate “in good faith”the end of the nuclear arms race and the elimination of their nuclear arsenals in return for other nations
not seeking nuclear weapons (IAEA, n.d., pp. 1, 4). As stated by the
Washington-based Institute for Public
Accuracy (2005b), 35 years after the adoption of the NPT, the nuclear weapon states have failed to live up to their part of the
treaty: [They] cynically [interpret] the NPT as a mechanism for the permanent maintenance of an
international system of nuclear apartheid in which only they can possess nuclear weapons ....Now
the Bush administration wants to add a second tier to its nuclear double standard by denying uranium enrichment—needed for both
nuclear power and weapons—to countries which don’t already have it. Today, the United States is spending about $40 billion
annually on nuclear weapons. U.S. nuclear weapons spending has grown by 84% since 1995. The United States was to spend about
$7 billion in 2005 to maintain and modernize nuclear warheads, excluding the billions of dollars it will spend to operate and
modernize its delivery and command and control systems. The U.S. arsenal has 10,000 nuclear warheads, and some 2,000 on “hair-
trigger alert,”each one many times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Institute for Public
Accuracy, 2005a) The New York Times reported on February 7,2005,that the Bush administration has “begun designing a new
generation of nuclear arms meant to be sturdier and more reliable and to have longer lives”(Broad, 2005, p. A1). Former U.S.
Senator Sam Nunn criticized the administration’s decision,saying that the United States has not set a good example for nuclear
nonproliferation (Agence France-Presse, 2005). El Baradei has also criticized the U.S. nuclear policy (Giacomo, 2003). “ The
U.S.
government demands that other nations not possess nuclear weapons; meanwhile, it is arming
itself....In truth there are no good or bad nuclear weapons. If we do not stop applying double
standards, we will end up with more nuclear weapons ,”El Baradei said. Writing in the editorial section of The
Washington Post, former President Jimmy Carter (2005) criticized the nuclear powers for refusing to meet their NPT nuclear
disarmament commitments. He argues, The United States is the major culprit in this erosion of the NPT. While claiming to be
protecting the world from proliferation threats in Iraq, Libya, Iran and North Korea, American leaders not only have abandoned
existing treaty restraints but also have asserted plans to test and develop new weapons, including anti-ballistic missiles, the earth-
penetrating “bunker buster”and perhaps some new “small”bombs. They also have abandoned past pledges and now threaten first
use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states. (p. A17) Whereas
Iran’s alleged violation of its commitments
under the NPT is important, the failure of the U nited States and the other nuclear weapon
states to follow through on their promise to work toward the elimination of nuclear weapons is
not deemed worthy of discussion . Conclusion This study supports Karim (2000) and McAlister’s (2001) findings that,
today, Orientalist depictions of Muslim countries and their political issues concentrate around
the idea that Islam is a source of threat . This study also finds that in the case of Iran’s nuclear program, the issue
of trust plays a more central role than the actual existence of evidence for Iran’s possession of a
clandestine nuclear weapons program. The present critical discourse analysis also reveals how the three elite
newspapers’editorials selectively framed the issues surrounding the Iranian nuclear dispute by
employing linguistic, stylistic, and argumentative maneuvers . Despite their differences in their policy
recommendations, none challenged the underlying assumptions that Iran has a clandestine nuclear
weapons program,that the Islamic nature of its government is a threat, and that it should not be
trusted with sensitive nuclear technology . Their inattention to the inconsistent nonproliferation policies of the United
States and other European nuclear powers shows the limits of media criticism of official policies
Irrational actors
The assumption that Third World military officers cannot control their impulses
entrenches an orientalist mindset that endorses negative racial stereotypes
Hugh Gusterson, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies at MIT, 2/1999,
“Nuclear Weapons and the Other in the Western Imagination,” JSTOR [BB]
After dictators and religious fanatics, the Western imagination is most afraid of Third World
military officers. The academics Brito and Intriligator, for example, tell us that Third World governments might
acquire nuclear weapons "mainly for deterrence purposes but might not be able to control such
weapons once they were available .... Unilateral initiatives by junior officers could lead to these
weapons going off" (Brito and Intriligator 1982:140). One finds the same presumption in the writings of Nigel Calder, who also
worries about Third World military officers: "An American or Russian general in Europe is not going to let off
the first nuclear weapon on his own initiative, even in the heat of battle, but will the same
discipline apply to ... a Pakistani general who has a private nuclear theory about how to liberate
Kashmir?" (1979:77). Oliver North notwithstanding, it is taken as so obvious it does not need explaining that Third World junior
officers, unlike our own, are prone to take dangerous unilateral initiatives. Calder's passage only makes sense if one accepts the
contrast it states as unquestionably natural. It is the kind of ideological statement that the French theorist Roland Barthes
characterized as "falsely obvious" (1972:11). As Edward Said says, once
a group has been orientalized, "virtually
anything can be written or said about it, without challenge or demurral " (1978:287). This
presumption that the Third World body politic cannot control its military loins is, I believe, a coded
or metaphorical way of discussing a more general lack of control over impulses , a pervasive lack
of discipline, assumed to afflict people of color .
Third world
Discursive appeals to the material suffering of those living in the Third World is
a smokescreen for the expansion of power and the creation of a regime of
knowledge that feels compelled to modernize and develop the non-West. This
turns the “under-developed” world into a space of thought and action that
reduces Latin American nations to pawns in an American economic plan
Escobar 1995 [Arturo, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, UNC-Chapel Hill Director, Institute of Latin American
Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of Geography, UNC-Chapel Hill Adjunct Professor, Department of
Communications, UNC-Chapel Hill Fellow, Institute of Arts and Humanities, UNC Fellow, Center for Urban and Regional Research,
UNC Facilitator, World Anthropologies Network / Red de Antropologías Mundiales Research Associate, Instituto Colombiano de
Antropología e Historia, Bogotá, “Encountering Development THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF THE THIRD WORLD” 1995, page 39-
40]
THE DISCOURSE OF DEVELOPMENT The Space of Development What does it mean to say that development started to function as a
discourse is the
discourse, that is, that it created a space in which only certain things could be said and even imagined? If
process through which social reality comes into being—if it is the articulation of knowledge and
power, of the visible and the expressible—how can the development discourse be individualized
and [is] related to ongoing technical, political, and economic events ? How did development become a
space for the systematic creation of concepts, theories, and practices? An entry point for this inquiry on the nature of development
as discourse is its basic premises as they were formulated in the 1940s and 1950s. The organizing premise was the
belief in the role of modernization as the only force capable of destroying archaic superstitions
and relations, at whatever social, cultural, and political cost . Industrialization and urbanization
were seen as the inevitable and necessarily progressive routes to modernization. Only through
material advancement could social, cultural, and political progress be achieved. This view determined the belief that
capital investment was the most important ingredient in economic growth and development .
The advance of poor countries was thus seen from the outset as depending on ample supplies of
capital to provide for infrastructure, industrialization, and the overall modernization of society. Where was this capital
to come from? One possible answer was domestic savings. But these countries were seen as trapped in a
“vicious circle” of poverty and lack of capital, so that a good part of the “badly needed” capital
would have to come from abroad (see chapter 3). Moreover, it was absolutely necessary that governments and
international organizations take an active role in promoting and orchestrating the necessary efforts to overcome general
backwardness and economic underdevelopment. What, then, were the most important elements that went into the formulation of
development theory, as gleaned from the earlier description? There was the process of capital formation, and the various factors
associated with it: technology, population and resources, monetary and fiscal policies, industrialization and agricultural
development, commerce and trade. There were also a series of factors linked to cultural considerations, such as education and the
need to foster modern cultural values. Finally, there was the need to create adequate institutions for carrying out the complex task
ahead: international organizations (such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, created in 1944, and most of the
United Nations technical agencies, also a product of the mid- 1940s); national planning agencies (which proliferated in Latin America,
especially after the inauguration of the Alliance for Progress in the early 1960s); and technical agencies of various kinds.
Development was not merely the result of the combination, study, or gradual elaboration of these elements (some of these
topics had existed for some time); nor the product of the introduction of new ideas (some of which were already appearing or
perhaps were bound to appear); nor the effect of the new international organizations or financial institutions (which had some
the result of the establishment of a set of relations
predecessors, such as the League of Nations). It was rather
among these elements, institutions, and practices and of the systematization of these relations
to form a whole. The development discourse was constituted not by the array of possible
objects under its domain but by the way in which, thanks to this set of relations, it was able to
form systematically the objects of which it spoke, to group them and arrange them in certain
ways, and to give them a unity of their own.21 To understand development as a discourse, one must look not at
the elements themselves but at the system of relations established among them. It is this system that allows the systematic creation
of objects, concepts, and strategies; it determines what can be thought and said. These relations— established
between institutions, socioeconomic processes, forms of knowledge, technological factors, and
so on—define the conditions under which objects, concepts, theories, and strategies can be
incorporated into the discourse. In sum, the system of relations establishes a discursive practice
that sets the rules of the game: who can speak, from what points of view, with what authority,
and according to what criteria of expertise; it sets the rules that must be followed for this or that
problem, theory, or object to emerge and be named, analyzed, and eventually transformed into
a policy or a plan. The objects with which development began to deal after 1945 were numerous and varied. Some of them
stood out clearly (poverty, insufficient technology and capital, rapid population growth, inadequate public services, archaic
agricultural practices, and so on), whereas others were introduced with more caution or even in surreptitious ways (such as cultural
attitudes and values and the existence of racial, religious, geographic, or ethnic factors believed to be associated with
backwardness). These elements emerged from a multiplicity of points: the newly formed international organizations, government
offices in distant capitals, old and new institutions, universities and research centers in developed countries, and, increasingly with
Everything was subjected to the eye of the new experts:
the passing of time, institutions in the Third World.
the poor dwellings of the rural masses, the vast agricultural fields, cities, households, factories,
hospitals, schools, public offices, towns and regions, and, in the last instance, the world as a
whole. The vast surface over which the discourse moved at ease practically covered the entire
cultural, economic, and political geography of the Third World . However, not all the actors distributed
throughout this surface could identify objects to be studied and have their problems considered. Some clear principles of authority
were in operation. They concerned the role of experts, from whom certain criteria of knowledge and competence were asked;
institutions such as the United Nations, which had the moral, professional, and legal authority to name subjects and define
These principles of
strategies; and the international lending organizations, which carried the symbols of capital and power.
authority also concerned the governments of poor countries, which commanded the legal
political authority over the lives of their subjects, and the position of leadership of the rich
countries, who had the power, knowledge, and experience to decide on what was to be done .
Economists, demographers, educators, and experts in agriculture, public health, and nutrition elaborated their theories, made their
assessments and observations, and designed their programs from these institutional sites. Problems were continually identified, and
Development proceeded by creating “abnormalities” (such as the
client categories brought into existence.
“illiterate,” the “underdeveloped,” the “malnourished,” “small farmers,” or “landless peasants”),
which it would later treat and reform . Approaches that could have had positive effects in terms
of easing material constraints became, linked to this type of rationality, instruments of power
and control. As time went by, new problems were progressively and selectively incorporated; once a problem was incorporated
into the discourse, it had to be categorized and further specified. Some problems were specified at a given level (such as local or
regional), or at various of these levels (for instance, a nutritional deficiency identified at the level of the household could be further
specified as a regional production shortage or as affecting a given population group), or in relation to a particular institution. But
these refined specifications did not seek so much to illuminate possible solutions as to give “problems” a visible reality amenable to
particular treatments. This seemingly endless specification of problems required detailed observations in villages, regions, and
Complete dossiers of countries were elaborated, and techniques of
countries in the Third World.
information were designed and constantly refined. This feature of the discourse allowed for the
mapping of the economic and social life of countries, constituting a true political anatomy of
the Third World.22 The end result was the creation of a space of thought and action the
expansion of which was dictated in advance by the very same rules introduced during its
formative stages. The development discourse defined a perceptual field structured by grids of observation, modes of inquiry
and registration of problems, and forms of intervention; in short, it brought into existence a space defined not so much by the
ensemble of objects with which it dealt but by a set of relations and a discursive practice that systematically produced interrelated
objects, concepts, theories, strategies, and the like.
Japan
Our understandings of Japan are rooted in our paradigm that forces Japan to be
WWII-era Japan -- that prevents true co-operation
Teramoto 01 (Fukimo Teramoto, Masters in Communication, Culture, and Technology at Georgetown University, pg 5-7, Japan
in an American Mirror: A Critical Study of American Perceptions of Japan)
The analysis of psychology of national trauma explains American attitudes toward Japanese
Americans immediately after the Pearl Harbor incident and the outrage of the American public
following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on the same footing. Both incidents can be
categorized as national trauma and both strong responses were resulted from collective sadness
and anger. Nonetheless, it is obvious that different perspectives are required to understand each response appropriately. In
other words, the theory of national trauma is insufficient to explain American attitudes towards Japanese Americans in those days.
In his further discussion, Neal describes American attitudes to the internment of Japanese Americans as follows: The deep-seated
racial prejudice toward Orientals prior to the war now became ethically embellished and perceived as justified. The
combination of extreme racism with anger and fear produced a highly volatile situation . (1998,
67) It is thus possible to say that the racial prejudice was awoken and took a hostile form
through the war, which is an ultimately negative form of interactions between the two
countries. Neal writes that “in telling and retelling the stories of our past, the events in question
became stereotyped and selectively distorted as they become embedded in collective
memories” (1998, 201). Undoubtedly, a historical event such as World War II, which caused
American national trauma, has become embedded in collective memories . World War II
memories have remained unchanged not only at the personal level but also at the national level
in the United States. Halbwachs discusses collective memory as the form of the reconstruction of the past. Halbwachs views
collective memory as being “under the influence of the present social milieu” (1992, 49). That is, the past is reconstructed in the
framework of the present society, which will reshape and even distort memories to a large extent. While Halbwachs suggests the
social restriction of collective memory, Neal
points out that collective memories are frequently drawn upon
to support a political position and that memories of World War II and the Vietnam War were
reflected in the policy on the Gulf War. Although national traumas cause collective fear, sadness,
and anger, as I discussed above, they also forge the collective identity of any given group of
people. According to Neal, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor followed by World War II
“produced nationally unprecedented feeling of cohesion, membership, belonging, and
community” among Americans (1998, 25). The strong identity of Americans grew out of the
trauma of the Pearl Harbor. This sense of collective identity can be another reason for long-
enduring memory of World War II in the United States. When identity, community, and sense of
unity have become weak in the course of the socio-cultural changes, collective memory might have filled
the sense of American identity. Not only in the United States but also in many countries public ceremonies or monuments in
commemoration of war can be seen as a symbol of collective fear, sadness, and anger and also collective identity of the time and of
subsequent times. From a more critical standpoint, Said raises an example of controversial attempt of
the Enola Gay.
Latin America
Representations of Latin America are contingent on Western stereotypes that
define them as an “other” from the West – this forecloses Latin American
autonomy in order to maintain false representations
Vinelli 17, Natalia Vinelli is the cofounder of Barricada TV - a cooperative TV channel and is
author of Television From Below: History, Difference and the Journalism of Counter-information.
(Reading Latin America through Edward Said)
https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/listeningpost/2017/03/reading-latin-america-edward-
170301141915571.html jl
Said's work is very relevant for anyone analysing international media's conception and
representation of Latin America. The images and narratives that are constantly circulated by
the mainstream press, by soap operas and dramas, find us cast in stereotypical roles, in line
with the prejudices of the West - countries that our economies are still dependent on. Take a
news outlet such as CNN Espanol - it projects a vision of what "the perfect Latin American"
should be: a businessman who is competitive, charming and open to western modernity -
servile to the rules and regulations of our globalised world, apologetic about his country's
underdevelopment and who feels part of a regional elite who are ultimately aligned with US
interests - or at least with the globalising hegemony of free trade agreements. This "perfect
Latin American" stands in contrast to another stereotype which we could define as "the
authentic Latin American" - it reflects another angle of the north's view of us. Cultural industries
project an image of emotional nations wedded to the whims of authoritarian and populist
leaders, and in this way, they condemn us to a permanent child-like status which prevents us
from making decisions about our future. These pre-conceived "Latin Americans" are seen as
children or noble savages in countries destined by their nature to live off farming and the
extraction of natural resources. Our world is reduced to an immutable essence , a superficially
marvellous essence which is also backward and even sometimes fearsome, but which can
prosper if it follows the advice of its civilised, powerful mentors.
Legal Citizen
the aff perpetuates the myth of the alien citizen—legally here but belonging
elsewhere
Ching-Jen 11, Clare, “Prof. at Denison university.” THE POSSIBILITIES OF ASIAN AMERICAN
CITIZENSHIP: A CRITICAL RACE AND GENDER ANALYSIS, Jen, Clare Ching Ethnic Studies Review;
2011; 34, 1/2; Ethnic NewsWatch//li cao. gw
Volpp's and Kang's critique of citizenship discourses explodes assumptions of abstract citizenship. Synthesized together, they
demonstrate how citizenship as legal status and rights has been differentially applied to subjects through
different moments in time and through processes of racialized and gendered exclusions . The scholarly works
examined in this section also confront color-blind assumptions of abstract, liberal citizenship through a racialized, though not
gendered, lens. In addition. one particular text challenges the assumed meaningless of citizenship as legal status in the struggle
towards equality. In conversation with Volpp's four citizenship discourses, Eric Yamamoto, Margaret Chon, Carol Izumi, Jeny Kang,
and Frank Wu, in Race, Rights and Reparation: Law and the Japanese internment, impressively dispel the notion of citizenship--as
legal status and rights--as uncomplicated by race (2001). However, they pay little attention to gendered processes of citizenship. In
addition, they touch upon political activity as it documents the Asian American community's fight for reparations from the U.S.
government. Citizenship as identity is touched upon; however, it is not theorized in ways similar to other scholarly works, specifically
those that examine Asian American cultural production. Yamamoto et al contend that the internment of 120,000 Japanese American
citizens and legal permanent residents during World War II resulted from legalized racial discrimination and not from viable national
security fears. They demonstrate how race
was central to the government's decision during World War II
to restrict the civil liberties of this marginalized group (15). Moreover, they show how legal processes
construct Asian Americans as particularly raced and othered. The term "historical race" refers to the
historical experiences of Asian Americans as outsiders , in contrast to white Americans who are
assumed to "belong" legitimately in the United States (13). Furthermore, the racialization of Asian Americans
nullifies notions of an abstract citizenship accorded through legal status. The authors demonstrate that the formal legal status of
Japanese Americans as American citizens was rendered meaningless through supposedly legitimate legal and political processes. This
dis-identification with national identity is a theme throughout most of these reviewed texts, including Mae M. Ngai's Impossible Sub-
jects: Illegal Aliens and The Making of Modern America (2004). This text is a historical study of race and U.S immigration policy and
practices during 1924 to 1965. Her research fills a knowledge gap in immigration historiography. Most immigration scholarship
focuses on the periods pre- 1924 and post- 1965; however, the author deems 1924-1965 significant as it marks the start and end of
the national origins quota system. Established by the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act (1924), the quota system set forth a "new
ethnic and racial map based on new categories and hierarchies of difference" and "articulated a new sense of territoriality, which
was marked by unprecedented awareness and state surveillance of the nation's contiguous land borders" (3). Not much scholarship
addresses how this system of immigration restriction and, by implication, restrictions on naturalization and citizenship, actually
functioned (3). As Yamamoto et al discuss "historical race," Ngai
suggests the concept of " 'alien citizens'---
persons who are American citizens by virtue of their birth in the United States but who are
presumed to be foreign by the mainstream of American culture and, at times, by the state " (2).
Ngai looks at the "alien citizenship" of Japanese Americans and Chinese Americans during World War II and the Cold War and
focuses on the Denationalization Act (1944) that enabled a citizen to voluntarily renounce citizenship. This act resulted in 5,000
citizenship renunciations by Japanese Americans. Scholarship on internment and renunciation treats its subjects as necessarily
coerced or in a state of mental instability to renounce citizenship. This, according to Ngai, is the result of other scholars projecting
their own valorizations of formal citizenship onto the renunciants (198). Instead, she suggests other explanations: 1) dual
nationalisms that may be 2) equally weak loyalties to the U.S. and Japan and/or 3) the result of pragmatic decisions to avoid
resettlement out of the concentration camps during the war and the white American hatred outside the camps (200). This suggests
an acknowledgement of the myth of citizenship as legal status and rights. A renunciation of a legal status that apparently holds no
value is not much of a loss, especially when faced with an uncertain future. The notion
of citizenship as only legal
status must be disrupted; however, it must not be foregone as part of the struggle towards
equality. Brooke Thomas, in her article "China Men, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, brings together legal and literary analyses to
offer a slightly different rendition of how the Supreme Court's decision in Wong Kim Ark (1898) was productive for Asian Americans.
While Volpp sees Wong Kim Ark as a limited victory for Asian American citizenship in the legal sense. Thomas sees the decision as
significant in vision---it rejects racial exclusions to birthright citizenship and privileges Chinese Americans as citizened subjects.
Through an analysis of Wong Kim Ark and Louis Althusser's concept of "subject." she puts forth citizenship as a lens through which
subjectivities can be expanded. She discusses Maxine Hong Kingston's model of citizenship from China Men-that belonging to
America involves the reconstruction of multiple subjectivities and identities territorially bound within the United States. This is
important with respect to Wong Kim Ark as birthright citizenship accorded to Chinese Americans allowed for dual citizenship.
Though the author concedes the Wong Kim Ark decision does not articulate a universally inclusive citizenship, she still holds
birthright citizenship as significant. If citizenship is to be viewed as a lens for understanding multiple subjectivities and identities that
interact within territorially-defined spaces, then the acquisition of legal citizenship as a result of the Wong Kim Ark decision is
meaningful.
Middle east
Your depiction of a violent Afghanistan entrenches Orientalism – reject it
Stanski 9 -- Doctoral Student at Nuffield College, University of Oxford (Keith, 1/23/2009, "`So These Folks are Aggressive': An
Orientalist Reading of Àfghan Warlords'," Security Dialogue 40(1), Sage)
Notions of a violent Afghan ‘Other’ persist in Anglo-American political thought about

Afghanistan. As suggested at the outset of this article, the longevity of this cultural construct depends in large
part on the lasting influence of Orientalist thought in Western attempts to claim greater political,
economic and moral authority over the Global South . This section briefly examines some of the core tenets of
Orientalism to suggest why and how this pattern of thought has long been, and continues to be, influential in the West’s repeated
violent interventions in the Global South. To understand the continued influence of Orientalist thought requires returning to its
longstanding argument about cultural difference. Orientalism presents the ‘Orient’ and the ‘West’ as starkly different, but mutually
constitutive, cultural realms. But, perhaps more striking than the supposed difference between the two realms is the inherent
inequality between them. Regardless of the context, the
Orient is consistently cast as inferior to the West , as
possessing clear deficiencies that only affirm its counterpart’s presumed superiority . For example,
the supposed barbaric nature of the Orient only reinforces the West’s assumed superiority as a model civil political order.
Orientalism’s argument about cultural difference advances an idealized vision of the lasting inequalities between the Orient and the
West. At first glance, Orientalist accounts of cultural difference appear antiquated. Its idealized patterns seemingly reveal less about
contemporary politics than about colonial times, when these types of stark assumptions about culture, race and gender were more
explicit in popular discourse. However, to dismiss theories of Orientalism on these grounds risks overlooking its inherent mutability,
its capacity to assume various forms depending on specific contexts. ‘Orientalism’, maintains Said, ‘depends for its strategy on this
flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever
losing him the relative upper hand’ (1978: 7; emphasis in original). These archetypes appear in various forms, contexts and
intensities across history; but, regardless of the context, the
Orient is described as fundamentally different
from and inferior to the West. Although it is important not to overstate the coherence of Orientalist thought, as it
contains a number of inconsistencies, omissions and discrepancies, the longevity of this broad ideology of difference is inseparable
from its capacity to preserve the West’s presumed superiority over the Global South, regardless of the historical context. More is at
stake in Orientalism’s persistence than just how one culture comes to understand another. As suggested above, this discursive
tradition has long informed how the West has attempted to expand its imperial influence over the Global South. Orientalist logic
shapes many of the core ideologies, identities and arguments that comprise this longstanding project. As Said (1978: 6) concludes,
‘Orientalism . . . is not an airy European fantasy about the Orient, but a created body of theory and practice in which, for many
generations, there has been a considerable material investment.’ Orientalism is not just a way of thinking about the Global
South, but also a way of conceptualizing its political landscape in a way that makes it susceptible to
certain kinds of management. Three of the patterns identified in this article are demonstrative of Orientalism’s lasting
influence in how the West attempts to manage the Global South. First, imperial powers return to Orientalist
patterns to justify their expanding influence across the Global South. This strategy can be seen in how the stark
contrasts that distinguish Orientalist thought can be manipulated to create urgent challenges that seemingly warrant greater
Western involvement. For example, in the months preceding the 2004 Afghan presidential election, US officials began to draw
an especially crude caricature of ‘Afghan warlords’ , casting many of their former allies and other militia
leaders as endangering the ongoing state-building process. This portrayal of Afghan politics helped
justify the United States’ increasing intervention in all facets of national politics, whether in government appointments or
the use of force against intransigent leaders. Orientalism validates the West’s capacity to resolve many of the supposed challenges
of politics in the Global South. Second, Orientalist thought has a tendency to accentuate the West’s imperial victories, no matter
their significance. Although Orientalist thought is rooted in an idealized vision of the West, this tradition inflates a seemingly minor
success into confirmation of the West’s inherent righteousness. This pattern was illustrated after the defeat of the Taliban.
Neoconservatives in the Bush administration heralded the US military for combining its ‘sophisticated’ technology with the
‘rudimentary’ Northern Alliance to defeat nothing less than the ‘cause of evil in the world’ (Rumsfeld, 2002: 3). This
aggrandizing effect helps Westerns leaders sustain their imperial missions, even in the most
dubious of circumstances. Finally, Orientalism defuses some of the inherent liabilities posed by the
West’s use of force. Amid the uncertainty, confusion and chaos of war, Western observers often turn to Orientalism’s flexible
narrative to help preserve Western supremacy. The utility of this pattern was evident at the Battle of Mazar-e-Sharif. US officials
deflected the risks of the Northern Alliance’s brutality by stressing before US voters and international observers the unfamiliar and
exotic qualities of their Afghan allies. Romantic accounts of ill-equipped horseback warriors distracted observers from the complete
story of the battlefield and suggested that their form of warfare was too foreign to be controlled. Orientalism helps the West try to
claim greater influence over how the battlefield is understood. This section argued that the continued existence of the
violent Afghan ‘Other’ construct is suggestive of the lasting influence of Orientalist thought in
Western relations with the Global South. As demonstrated in this study of Afghanistan, this ideology of
difference has lasting consequences for how the West understands, justifies and expands its
influence in the Global South, particularly through the use of force. This means scholars are left not
only to identify the influence of Orientalist thought throughout the history of Western political thought about the
Global South, but also to assess how it shapes imperial social relations. Conclusion This article began by noting
the peculiar place of ‘Afghan warlords’ in contemporary debates about Afghanistan. These armed actors have been simultaneously
condemned as some of the most abhorrent figures in Afghan politics, on the one hand, and valorized as essential international allies
or recast as seemingly innocuous ‘local commanders’, on the other. The article argued that the contested nature of this label stems
from an older pattern in Anglo-American thought to construct a violent Afghan ‘Other’ that departs from, but also confirms,
purportedly essential features of the West. Similar to British descriptions of the ‘Afghan people’ during the First Anglo-Afghan War,
contemporary US conceptions of ‘Afghan warlords’ are distinguished by this cultural construct’s
Orientalist archetypes about the violent and treacherous nature of Afghans and the superiority
of Western modes of warfare. The longevity of this construct can be traced back, in large part, to the lasting influence of
Orientalist thought in Western violent interventions in the Global South. In contemporary times, Orientalist conceptions of
‘Afghan warlords’ have simultaneously deflected attention away from liabilities in the battlefield, affirmed
US military supremacy and validated an increasingly troubled intervention in Afghan politics. This
suggests that greater scrutiny should be paid to the origins of evocative labels and how imperial powers employ them to sustain
their influence across the Global South.
Reps key in the context of counterterrorism

De Graaf 10 (Beatrice, researcher for the Centre for Terrorism and Counterterrorism. Bob, professor for Terrorism and
Counterterrorism studies, “Bringing politics back in: the introduction of the 'performative power' of counterterrorism,” Critical
Studies on Terrorism, Volume 3, Issue 2, informaworld)
In sum, it is almost impossible to measure arithmetically the outcome of counterterrorism efforts .

However, this does not mean that we cannot and should not try to assess the effect of governmental policies. The issues outlined
above suggest that it is not necessarily the policy measures and their intended results as such, but
much more the way in which they are presented and perceived that determine the overall effect
of the policy in question. The key question is therefore really: What do counterterrorism policy-
makers want? They set the agenda with respect to the phenomenon of terrorism , define it in a
certain way and link it to corresponding measures . Subsequently, they execute these measures,
behind closed doors, and with the tacit permission of the public - or, conversely, they feel forced to 'market'
their measures first, in order to generate a substantial level of public and political support. The way in which they
perform, or in other words carry out the process of countering terrorism, can have more impact
than the actual arrests being made (or not being made). This is what we call the performativity
of counterterrorism, or its 'performative power' . The authors would like to introduce the concept 'performativity'1
in this discussion, expressing the extent to which a national government, by means of its official counterterrorism policy and
corresponding discourse (in statements, enactments, measures and ministerial remarks), is successful in 'selling' its representation
of events, its set of solutions to the terrorist problem, as well as being able to set the tone for the overall discourse regarding
terrorism and counterterrorism - thereby mobilising (different) audiences for its purposes.2 There is of course a difference between
threat assessment and threat perception, and there are other players in the field apart from official state actors. Here, however, our
focus is on the government's attempts to persuade public opinion of the legitimacy and accuracy of its threat assessment. In
terms of developing counterterrorism policies, this is particularly relevant because
counterterrorism officials - and we as academics and advisers - can exert influence particularly
on this field (see also the introduction and conclusion in Forest 2009). Counterterrorism measures (in
statements, enactments, activities, expressions made by cabinet members) set the tone for the
political and public debate. Government statements and memoranda are not mere texts: they
create reality. This is certainly the case when the presentation and definition of new policy
dovetails with existing threat perceptions in the population (on communism, immigration or new religions, for
instance); when they tune in to historical experiences (such as previous conflicts, attacks or major disasters); if
they depict the alleged terrorist threat as foreign, radically 'different' and alien or fundamentally
hostile; or if they succeed in promoting terrorism as a central issue in a political game or
campaign (by portraying the opposition as being 'soft on terrorism' or by presenting themselves as the nation's saviour from all
evil).3 When these implicitly or explicitly formulated representations of 'threats', 'enemies' and
'security' are accepted by the majority of the population, political and social conflicts could be
heightened. Consensus subsequently gives way to polarisation , acceptance of the limitation of
civil liberties and stigmatisation of radical ideas. Counterterrorism measures therefore clarify which radical ideas
are still tolerated, what level of sympathy with revolutionary terrorists is still permitted and which infringements on civil liberties are
accepted for the sake of national security.
Representations are the root cause of policy failures and Middle East conflict
Pinar Bilgin, PhD International Politics, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Department of International Relations Bilkent Univ.,
Regional Security in the Middle East 20 05 p. 12-5
Reflecting upon the history of US engagement with the Middle East, Douglas Little identifies
representations of the region as the problem behind policy failures . According to Little, it is 'American
Orientalism' defined as 'a tendency to underestimate the peoples of the region and to
overestimate America's ability to make a bad situation better' that has often misled US policy-
makers in their dealings with the region . Regarding the future, Little (2002:314) writes: Although there is greater
appreciation for the complexities of the Muslim world than a generation ago, most Americans still view radical Islam
as a cause for instant alarm. Having been fed a steady diet of books, films and news reports
depicting Arabs as demonic anti-Western others and Israelis as heroic pro-Western partners and
having watched in horror the events of 11 September, the American public understandably fears
Osama bin Laden and cheers Aladdin. Little's argument builds upon that of Edward Said in his 1978 book
Orientalism, where the author pointed to the relationship between representations and practice . Said's
point was that the academic discourse of Orientalism (defined as 'a style of thought based upon an ontological and
epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and [most of the time] “the Occident”' [Said 1995a: 2]) had not only
helped to make the Middle East what it has become but also made it difficult to become
something else: a book on how to handle a fierce lion might … cause a series of books to be produced on such subjects as the
fierceness of lions, the origins of fierceness, and so forth. Similarly , as the focus of the text centers more narrowly
on the subject - no longer lions but their fierceness - we might expect that the ways by which it is
recommended that a lion's fierceness be handled will actually increase its fierceness, force it to
be fierce since that is what it is, and that is what in essence what we know or can only know about it. (Said 1995a: 94)
This is because the Orientalist discourse does not merely represent the 'Orient' but also lays down the
rules that enable one to 'write, speak and act meaningfully' (Agnew and Corbridge 1995:45). In his later works
(see Said 1994b, 1995b, 1997, 2001) Said went on to show how contemporary representations of the Middle East
(and Islam) in the media (as well as academia) have reduced it to terrorism and very little else . Said's argument is in
line with E.P. Thompson's observation on the impact British historical representations of India have had on Indian politics (Said
2001:44-5). According to Thompson, writings on India in English 'simply left out the Indian side of things' thereby deepening the
irreconcilability between Indians and the British. Thompson wrote: Our misrepresentation of Indian history and character is one of
the things that have so alienated the educated classes of India that even their moderate elements have refused to help the Reforms
[of colonial policy]. Those measures, because of this sullenness, have failed, when they deserved a better fate. (quoted in Said
2001:45) Reading Thompson, one is reminded of the numerous attempts made by US policy-makers
during the Cold War to generate reform and modernisation movements in the Middle East; some
of which attempts have backfired (as with Iraq, Libya and Iran) (Little 2002:193-227). What Little, Thompson and Said
are pointing to are the different impact representations have on those who produce the
representations and those who are represented. What all share is the damaging effect
representations have had on both groups of actors. According to Said, the Middle East as a spatial
representation has been repressive in that it has had 'the kind of authority … [that] doesn't
permit or make room for interventions on the part of those represented' (Said 2001:42). The Middle
Eastern security discourse, which is informed by this representation, has reflected the Cold War
security concerns of the great powers while neglecting that of regional states and peoples . Hence
the argument that the current state of regional insecurity in the Middle East has its roots in practices
that have been informed by its dominant representation : the 'Middle East'. By way of adopting this spatial
representation, the Middle East has been categorised in terms of its politics (as the region that 'best
fits the realist theory of international politics' [Nye 2000:163]) and the type of foreign policy its
'nature' demands. In the immediate aftermath of the US-led war on Iraq, one newspaper columnist warned: 'Middle East is
not Europe' (Zaharna 2003). Indeed. Yet, this should not be taken to suggest that the Middle East is
destined to relive its insecure past. Such representations that emphasised Middle Eastern
insecurities without reflecting upon their roots have had the effect of privileging certain security
practices (such as the 1998-99 bombing campaign directed at obtaining Iraqi cooperation with the UN team inspecting the
Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programme) whilst marginalising others (such as the adoption of a more
comprehensive long-term policy of creating a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East). Becoming aware of the 'politics of
the geographical specification of politics' (Dalby 1991:274) and exploring the mutually constitutive
relationship between (inventing) regions, and (conceptions and practices of) security is not mere
intellectual exercise; it helps reveal the role human agency has played in the past and could play
in the future. Such awareness, in turn, would enable one to begin thinking differently about
regional security to help constitute an alternative future whilst remaining sensitive to regional
actors' multiple and contending conceptions of security, what they view as referent object(s),
and how they think security should be sought in this part of the world.
The Knowledge Apparatus of Western Thinking is The Root Cause of Middle

East Instability and leads to Extinction.
Bilgin 2005 – Prof Ir Bikent University Regional Security in the Middle East a Critical Perspective, Page 164-165
Thinking about the future from a critical security perspective need not be limited to 'desired' futures only. Students of
security could also try and shape the future by pointing to what some futures may bring if no preventive
action is taken in the present - as Ulrich Beck has done in Risk Society (1992). According to Beck, if threats to security are
'threats to the future', as is the case with many environmental threats (such as depletion of natural resources), then, it is imperative
that they be addressed in the present. For, through
our past decisions about atomic energy and our present
decisions about the use of genetic technology, human genetics, nanotechnology and computer
science, we unleash unforeseeable, uncontrollable, indeed even, incommunicable consequences that
threaten life on earth. (Beck 2003:257) 'As conjectures, as threats to the future, as prognoses, [such threats] have and
develop a practical relevance to preventive actions', notes Beck (1992:34). However, one problem with trying to mobilise action to
meet such threats is that they only exist in the future as conjectures. It is only through thinking and writing about such threats that
one could raise peoples' awareness regarding what the future may bring, and what needs to be done in the present to prevent them
from happening. When issues such as threats to the environment are concerned, thinking(and writing) about the
future becomes crucial; otherwise they have the potential to cause destruction on 'such a scale
that action afterwards would be practically impossible ' (Beck 1992:34). Although Beck's thesis is about the
environment, the points he makes in explaining the way human agency has been complicit, via the
production of knowledge, in exacerbating (if not creating) 'threats to the future' could be adopted and
adapted to further develop the critique students of critical security present of prevailing security
discourses in general and US discourse on regional security in the Middle East in particular. Beck (1992:183) writes:
In contrast to all earlier epochs … the risk society is characterized by a lack : the impossibility of an external
attribution of hazards. In other words, risks depend on decisions … Risks are the reflection of human actions and omissions,
the expression of highly developed productive forces. That means that the sources of danger are no longer
ignorance but knowledge; not a deficient but a perfected mastery over nature. Beck's point is made
within the context of environmental politics, where the grip of 'scientific' knowledge over practice is even stronger than in the less
'scientific' Security Studies. Nevertheless, as noted above, knowledge about the future, presented in terms of obstacles and
opportunities, both constrains and informs actors' practices thereby helping constitute the future. Then, given
the ways in
which the Middle Eastern security discourse has, in the past, been complicit in shaping regional
insecurity in the Middle East, it could be argued that uncritical adoption of existing knowledge
produced by prevailing discourses that do not offer anything other than more of the same does
itself constitute a 'threat to the future' . Accordingly, students of security who fail to reflect upon the
self-constitutive potential of their thinking would be complicit in perpetuating regional
insecurity in the Middle East.
Multi-culturalism/techno coolies link
Multiculturalism is a form of settler hospitality that refies the paradoxical
relationship of the Asian Alien which reinforces the abstraction of those held in
the spectrum of the Myth of the Model Minority.
Day 16 Specialization:Asian American literature and visual culture, Critical Ethnic Studies,
Bringing together the aesthetic structure of stranger inhospitality, the tragicomedy of working-class Asian labor, and bad Asian
capital explored in Lum’s work as conceptual anchors for my focus on Yamashita’s novel, my overarching argument is that
neoliberal multiculturalism reinforces the abstraction of both wealthy and poor Asian North
Americans. In the aftermath of immigration reforms that increasingly privilege wealthy Asian
migrants and exclude poor Asian migrants,52 romantic anticapitalism rejects the former for being agents of an
economic takeover and the latter for draining economic resources and “stealing jobs,” once again bearing out the
contradictory promise of settler colonial hospitality. Thoroughly denaturalizing the role of the border as barrier
and conduit for flows of labor and capital, Lum’s and Yamashita’s works highlight the devaluation of human labor
as the racial and economic fulfillment of settler colonial capitalism. What Tropic of Orange brings to this
argument is a view into the dehumanization and subjective experience of both retro and high-tech coolies. Complementing each
other’s vision of the intersection of race and urban labor, Lum’s and Yamashita’s works together refract the
effects of the neoliberalization of immigration policy and its perversion of race discourse
through multicultural rhetoric. Representing an expansion rather than a break from a prior abstract racialization, in the
contemporary context of global capitalism, migration, and neoliberal ideology, Asians are both the primary racial
subject of neoliberal multiculturalism and the ongoing racial target of romantic anticapitalism.
North Korea
During the Korean war, the us waged a war of wanton destruction onto South
and North Korea. Depictions of unstable leadership serve to reproduce US
interventionalist and US threat production.
Barkawi 13 Tarak Barkawi is associate professor in the Department of Politics, New School for
Social Research. He earned his doctorate at the University of Minnesota and specialises in the
study of war, armed forces and society with a focus on conflict between the West and the global
South. He has written on colonial armies, "small wars" and imperial warfare, the Cold War in the
Third World, and on counterinsurgency and the War on Terror. More generally, he is interested
in the place of armed force in histories and theories of globalisation, modernisation and
imperialism, especially from a postcolonial perspective. Nuclear Orientalism//SP
Once again, the Crazy Emperor of the Hermit Kingdom - North Korea - is threatening nuclear
war. Or so the media would have us believe. The BBC and other news outlets have taken to
publishing maps with concentric rings donating the speculative ranges of North Korea's creaky
missile systems. One never tested missile might possibly reach Alaska and do for Sarah Palin and
the polar bears. The basic idea purveyed by the media and by US spokespersons is that
Oriental despotisms -as Iran and North Korea are regularly portrayed - cannot possibly be
trusted with nuclear weapons. Accordingly, US policy, to which the UN and much of the world
have subscribed, is that it will "never accept" an Iranian or North Korean bomb. While rational
people would never use a nuclear weapon except in circumstances in which it was rational to do
so, unbalanced, crazy types might decide to unleash their nuclear arsenals, or turn them over to
terrorists, or what not. It would seem that only rational Western nations like the US can be
trusted with nukes. Images of Mad Mullahs and Asiatic Despots aside, there are obvious reasons why Iran and North Korea
would want nuclear weapons. Most significantly, a nuclear weapon is a guarantee that they will not suffer the same fate as Iraq in
2003. One of the only times it is rational and credible to make nuclear threats is in a situation of existential crisis - when regime
survival is at stake. For this reason, no one invades or pushes too far a power armed with nuclear
weapons. Were Iran or North Korea to use a nuclear weapon in any other circumstance, they would face obliteration. Since
nuclear weapons can be traced to their origin, it would be suicidal for these countries to provide weapons to terrorist groups. Such
groups do not have a country to lose, unlike the leaderships of Iran and North Korea. So if Iran and North Korea turn out to have
rational reasons for pursuing nuclear weapons, and are likely to be governed by the same realities of nuclear deterrence that
constrained the US and the Soviet Union in the Cold War, what about the rationality of US policy? For one, for the US to say it
will "never accept" what is already a reality is an absurdity : North Korea already has the bomb. It must now
be treated as a nuclear power. More broadly, the recent history of US foreign policy is not exactly a
testament to rationality. In response to a terrorist attack which killed nearly 3,000 of its
citizens, the US invaded two countries, starting wars that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of
thousands. Ten years later, it has lost both of those wars and broken its budget. Luckily, not every country that suffers from
terrorism reacts with such deadly and self-defeating spasms of revenge and blood lust. North Korea has in living
memory suffered from the wanton destructiveness of US policy. This is a fact which must be remembered
in the face of media images of North Korea's supposedly irrational militarism and aggressiveness. Over the three years of the Korean
War, in the words of General Curtis LeMay, the
US Air Force "burned down every town in North and South
Korea". The US used 12,000 pound "Tarzan" bombs until there were no more targets for them,
in addition to thousands upon thousands of bombing sorties. Thousand pound napalm bombs
were dropped from B-29s to "wipe out all life" in tactical localities. Towards the end of the war, the
US bombed North Korea's dams. One resulting flood "scooped clean" 27 miles of river valley. Moreover, it is the US
which has made repeated nuclear threats against North Korea, despite the fact that North Korea has never posed a serious threat to
the US. The use of nuclear weapons was considered several times during the Korean War, both tactical and strategic. In April 1951,
B-29s with nuclear weapons were deployed to Guam, ready for use if China escalated its conventional involvement in the war. Later
in the war, lone B-29s simulated nuclear attack runs on Pyongyang. Over the course of the war, a million
North Korean civilians were killed by US, UN and South Korean forces. This history offers some
perspective on the recent crisis, which began not with North Korean threats but with US and
South Korean war games and manoeuvres. These included practice sorties by two nuclear
capable B-2 stealth bombers sent over South Korea, loudly announced in the media so that
the point would not be lost on North Korea's leaders. North Korea responded with bombast,
including the incredible notion that it was preparing an amphibious invasion of the US. Guam,
still a base for US nuclear bombers, was "threatened" by North Korea's jury-rigged missiles. In
turn, the US deployed its equally ineffective but much more expensive THAAD missile defence
system to Guam. One wonders what is more laughable: the idea that North Korea could hit a speck in the Pacific like Guam or
that the boondoggle offspring of Ronald Reagan's Star Wars might actually work. What is not laughable is the fact that it is the US
which has a consistent pattern of threatening the use - including first use - of nuclear weapons.
No one is in doubt that US nuclear weapons actually work, and the US remains the only power ever to have used them in anger.
Notably, it used them in a situation in which it was itself no longer threatened. The North Korean bomb may be an uncomfortable
fact of life. But so too is the US bomb. And none of us should make any easy assumptions about the rationality of the leadership of
either country, however.
Representations of North Korea are rooted in ideological hegemony not

objective data
David Shim, Phd Candidate @ GIGA Institute of Asian Studies, ‘8 [Paper prepared for presentation at the 2008 ISA, Production,
Hegemonization and Contestation of Discursive Hegemony: The Case of the Six-Party Talks in Northeast Asia,
www.allacademic.com/meta/p253290_index.html]
Laclau and Mouffe’s (2001: chapter 2) concept of hegemony, which is used here, rely on a notion developed by Antonio Gramsci
(1971).Gramsci broadened the traditional notion of hegemony b eyond the view of mapping hegemony in
by introducing inter-subjective and
terms of leadership and dominance, which are based on material capabilities,
ideological aspects into this concept . Accordingly, hegemony contains the ability of a class
(bourgeois) to project the world view over another (workers, peasantry) in terms of the former , so that it is
accepted as common sense or reality. His merit was to conceptualize hegemony in terms of power without the use of force to reach
consent by the dominated class through education and, what he calls, the role of intellectuals (“men of letters”) such as
philosophers, journalists and artists (Gramsci 1971: 5-43). The process of fixing meaning, that is, in terms of Laclau and Mouffe
(2001: 105), when an element (sign with unfixed meaning) is transformed through articulation into a moment (sign with fixed
meaning), is hegemonic, since it reduces the range of possibilities and excludes alternative meanings by determining the ways in
when meaning is fixed, i.e. hegemonized, it
which the signs are related to each other. That is to say,
determines, what can be thought, said or done in a meaningful way . 13 Applied to this case, the
exclusive character of a hegemonic discourse makes it unintelligible to make sense of North
Korea’s nuclear program in terms of, for instance, energy needs, because – as it is argued – practices
of problematization hegemonized the ways of thinking, acting and speaking about North Korea .
Discursive hegemony can be regarded as the result of certain practices, in which a particular understanding or interpretation
This naturalization consolidates a specific idea,
appears to be the natural order of things (Laclau/Mouffe 2001).
which is taken for granted by involved actors and makes sense of the(ir) world. As Hall (1998: 1055-7)
argues, common sense resembles a hegemonic discourse, which is a dominant interpretation and representation of reality and
therefore accepted to be the valid truth and knowledge. Referring to the productive character of discursive hegemony, the Six-Party
Talks can be regarded as an outcome of the dominating interpretation of reality (cf. also Jackson 2005: 20; Cox 1983; Hajer 2005).
The hegemonic discourse regarding North Korea provides the framework for a specific
interpretation in which the words, actions or policies of it are attached with meaning, that is, are
problematized. As Jacob Torfing argues “a discursive truth regime […] specifies the criteria for judging
something to be true of false ”, and further states, that within such a discursive framework the criteria for
acknowledging something as true, right or good are negotiated and defined (Torfing 2005a: 14; 19; cf. also
Mills 2004: 14-20). However, important to note is, if one is able to define this yardstick, not only one is able to define what is right,
if you can mark someone or something with a
good or true, but also what kinds of action are possible. In other words,
specific label, then certain kinds of acts become feasible .14 Basically, it can be stated that discursive hegemony
depends on the interpretation and representation by actors of real events since the interpretation of non-existent facts would not
make sense. But the existence of real events does not necessarily have to be a prerequisite for hegemonizing interpretational and
representational practices becauseactions do not need to be carried out, thus, to become a material fact,
in order to be interpreted and represented in a certain way (Campbell 1998: 3). Suh Jae-Jung (2004: 155) gives
an example of this practice. In 1999 US intelligence agencies indicated to preparing measures taken by
North Korea to test fire a missile. Although the action was not yet executed, it was treated as a
fact, which involved and enabled certain implications and material consequences such as the public
criticism of North Korea, the issuance of statements, diplomatic activity and efforts to hegemonize and secure this
certain kind of reality, i.e. to build a broad majority to confirm this view on North Korea. In other words, the practices of
problematizing North Korea took place even before an action was done.
Nuclear Proliferation
Prolif and nuclear deterrence is an epistemological excuse for violence AND THE
CONSTRUCTION OF THE DISCOURSE THAT WE CAN ONLY TRUST THE WEAPONS
OF GOD WITH WESTERN NATIONS– their discourse wrecks alternative
approaches – and trades off with structural violence.
Woods 7 Matthew, PhD in IR @ Brown - Researcher @ Thomas Watson Institute of
International Relations [Journal of Language and Politics 6.1“Unnatural Acts: Nuclear Language,
proliferation, and order,” p. 116-7]
It is important to identify, expose and understand the successful creation of 'proliferation' as
the inevitable, uncontrollable and dangerous spread of nuclear arms because it changed the world in
innumerable ways. On one hand, it is the chief motivation for a wide array of cooperative endeavors among
states and the central rationale for the most successful arms control agreement in modern history, the NPT. It inspired sacrifices
that led to faith in our regard for others and stimulated confidence in international law. On the other hand, it is the
reason for an unparalleled collection of international denial and regulatory institutions and it
is the omnipresent and ineliminable threat at the heart of our chronic, unremitting suspicion
of others. It is a cause of global inequality and double-standards among states and the
progenitor of the name and identity 'rogue state' (states that reject the whaling ban are not 'rogue states'). It is
a central element in world-wide toleration for human misery, such as starvation in North Korea,
and in public toleration for the clear deception and dissembling of government elites , such as in the
US. It is a vehicle in some media for racial stereotypes. The existence of 'proliferation' is a primary
rationale among nuclear states for preserving and improving their nuclear arsenals. And faith in the
existence of 'Proliferation’: most recently, brought about invasion, war and continuing death in
the Middle East. Every individual that fears it, organization that studies it and state that strives
to prevent it embraces 'proliferation' as a real and known thing and, in part, orients their identity
and behavior according to it. The successful creation of 'proliferation' represents the creation of
our common sense, our everyday life and our natural attitude toward the nuclear world 'out there.' It
is uncontestable and to suggest otherwise that nuclear states might be to blame for any spread of nuclear arms, or that it has
actually been rare and so far benign or that it may even be beneficial (see a critical review of this literature in Woods 2002) - is to
invite derision and ostracism. The reality of 'proliferation' is so massive and solidified that the essential role of (cell) proliferation in
maintaining life and health is virtually forgotten, overwhelmed, its positive meaning restricted to the doctor's office and biology lab.
In short, the
creation of 'proliferation' is a textbook example of what some term hegemony, the
creation by a dominant group of a world that realizes its ideological preferences while
marginalizing other possibilities and co-opting subordinates.
Nurses
The 1ac’s strategy is in cahoots with the violent super-structure of globalized
orientalism. The dispersal of Filipino nurses can only serve to refashion
alienation and structural violence.
Rafael 8, Vincente L. is professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies. He was born and
raised in Manila, Philippines, obtained his BA from Ateneo de Manila University and received his
MA and PhD from Cornell University. His research and teaching include areas in the history of
the Philippines, comparative colonialism and nationalism, language and power, translation and
the historical imagination and more recently on the comparative formation of the post-colonial
humanities. “Reorientations Notes on the Study of the Philippines in the United States,”
Philippine Studies, Vol. 56, No. 4, Vanua in Batanes (december 2008), pp. 487-488
https://www.jstor.org/stable/42633978 jl
I want now to move on to the third and final reorientation in

recent American studies of the Philippines or, more
precisely, of Filipinos: the use of "diaspora" as a descriptive and analytical category for addressing
the grow-ing legions of overseas and immigrant Filipinos. As a term of description, "diaspora" entails, as Rhacel
Parrefias (2001, 269) writes in Servants of Globalization, the "forced dispersal of a particular group of
people from their homeland to a multitude of countries." It has also been used, perhaps more
problematically, to designate immigrant Filipino populations, usually in the United States (while other immigrants in, say, Canada or
Australia, get far less attention). Martin Ponce (2006) has recently pointed the difficulties in-herent in the descriptive and
sociological uses of the term "diaspora." Forstarters, it begs the question: who constitutes the Filipino
diaspora? What do nurses in Houston, domestics in Florence, Catholic priests in Central Asia, engineers in Saudi
Arabia, soldiers in the U.S. forces in Iraq, second generation Berkeley students, first generation manong
in Honolulu, TNT (undocumented) service workers in San Francisco, and tenured professors in Kyoto have in common aside
from the fact of having some ancestral con-nection of varying proximity to the Philippines? "Diaspora" like the similarly
problematic coinage "global Filipinos" repeatedly fails as a term of identity simply because it is unable to subsume and so account
for the social forma-tion of such a broad diversity of "Filipinos." Still the term persists in part because it seems for the moment the
only workable way to think about the dispersal of so many Filipinos outside of the Philippines
and account for the structural violence visited by globalization that forces them out of the
nation. It is also the related structural violence of racism and sexism that leaves Filipino
immigrant populations feeling less than assimilated, "homeless ," if you will, in the U.S. Indeed, it is
out of this anxiety of assimilation that the most widespread of Filipino American self-
conception is fashioned: the woeful sense of invisibility and the paradoxical desire for recognition from the very powers
that withhold it. If "diaspora" refers to anything then, it is to this sense of "invisibility," of felt absence,
exile, difference, and so forth that Filipinos experience abroad , or, in the case of second- and third-
generation Filipinos, confront in the racially charged societies into which they are born. "Diaspora"
thus refers not so much to what is essentially "Filipino" but to what is always already missing
for which the term "Filipino" seems at best to be a stand in. This in itself is instructive. As Ponce (2006; 2008)
points out, following the work of African-American scholar Brent Hayes Edwards (2003 ), "diaspora" is most productive
as a term of address. Rather than refer to a social group with a common culture and origin, diaspora is perhaps
more useful as a way of speaking to, of, and for diverse peoples whose identities and
identifications are far from settled. The "Filipino diaspora" cannot then be thought of as a duly constituted, fully
formed community. At best, it is a periodic gathering and dispersal of folks through a variety of
media and often through the lingua franca of English and Taglish. Such communities of discourse, if we
can call them that, are
constantly coming to terms with and forever coming short of articulating
their "Filipinoness" alongside their jagged, irregular, and volatile connections to the Philippine
nation-state. It is in this regard that we can think of the ethnographic and historical works of Yen Le Espiritu (2003), Enrique
Bonus (2000), Martin Manalan-san (2003), Catherine Choy (2003), Dorothy Fujita-Rony (2003), Augusto Espiritu (2005), Theodore
Gonzalves (2001), Linda Espana-Maram (2006), Jonathan Okamura (1998), as well as the literary writings of Jessica Hage-dorn
(1990), Zak Linmark (1995), Luis Francia (1993), among many others. Each in her or his own way examines the diasporic conditions of
Filipino Americans, highlighting
the historical forces of imperialism and racism that underlie their
differences from but also broach their possible sameness with other Americans and Filipinos
from the Philippines. Put differently, "diaspora" provides a medium for generating
communication, or more precisely for communicating, what nevertheless eludes communicability.
Additionally these scholars share a vexed and ambivalent relationship with the related fields of Asian American and Asian studies. On
the one hand, they see in these fields shared concerns and alliances around issues, for example, of immigration, race, gender, and
the geopolitical, transnational construction of such topics. On the other hand, they have also experienced a sense of ne-glect,
marginalization, and disregard for the specificities of Filipino Ameri-can history. The spectral outlines of a "Filipino diaspora" are thus
conjured as an imperfect token with which to sum up these tense and tenuous ties with these academic "homes."
Pakistan
The aff’s false good intentions serve as a precursor to western internationalism,
recreating violence and serial policy failure
MacDonald 10 Myra MacDonald is a former Reuters journalist who has worked in Europe, the
Middle East and South Asia. She was Chief Correspondent in France and Bureau Chief in India.
After publishing Heights of Madness, a book on the Siachen war between India and Pakistan, she
has focused in recent years on writing about Pakistan. Orientalism” in Afghanistan and
Pakistan//SP
In his must-read essay on the debate about the state of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship, Amil Khan has one of the best opening lines
I’ve seen for a while: “Much
is said about Pakistan, but I’m constantly saddened that so many
innocent pixels are lost without good cause.” Much the same can be said about the recent flurry of stories on the
war in Afghanistan, from upbeat assessments of the U.S.-led military offensive in Kandahar to renewed interest in the prospects for
a peace deal with Afghan insurgents. There
is a shade of “Orientalism” in all this, a modern-day equivalent
of Edward Said’s 1978 argument that the
collective understanding of the Middle East, South Asia
and Islam was skewed by the vested interests of European colonial powers . Scroll forward to the 21st
century and we have the United States keen to end a war that is increasingly unpopular at home, with a president who has
committed to starting to bring home troops by July 2011. That framework would be best suited by military success in Afghanistan,
peace talks which would begin to show fruit by – let’s choose a random date, July 2011 – and a willingness by Pakistan to stick to the
U.S. timetable when it comes to tackling militants on its own territory. Hence the “received wisdom” in the media – or perhaps more
precisely, the consensus you would find if you averaged out all the stories on Google News – tends to fit neatly into that
framework. The problem is that just as Said complained the “Orientalist” world view distorted the facts to suit European interests,
the current U.S.-inspired narrative tends to overlook the very real people and countries which
get in the way of its own deadlines. Start with Afghanistan. We have heard from non-U.S. sources that all
insurgent groups are engaged in tentative “talks about talks” to try to agree the ground rules under which all Afghan factions could
be brought together into “reconciliation” talks. The United States and NATO have meanwhile been talking up a separate effort to
win over individual insurgent fighters or commanders through “reintegration”.It
is not even clear that these two
processes – reconciliation and reintegration – can work alongside each other. Arguably an
aggressive drive to break the insurgency through reintegration undermines any chances of reconciliation by increasing mistrust. But
more to the point – at least on the subject of this post – why is anyone assuming the Afghans – insurgents or otherwise – will stick to
the U.S. timetable? Afghans have a reputation for being fiercely independent; negotiations have a history of being long and
protracted, and undercut by broken promises on all sides. “Let’s get this sorted out by July 2011,” may be boardroom language, but
it is not a sentence you would expect to hear about Afghanistan. Or as one Afghan-watcher said to me: “We should avoid writing
Afghan history to suit our convenience.”Then there is Pakistan
– a country of nearly 180 million people who
on the whole are somewhat reluctant to follow the American narrative. As Amil Khan
writes: “Pakistan’s problems with extremism will not end with the U.S.-led involvement in
Afghanistan because the problem did not start with 9/11.” Regardless of any peace deal in Afghanistan, the United States still
has to figure out how to manage its relationship with Pakistan to ensure Islamist militants no longer pose a threat either to the
outside world or to Pakistan itself. The country has been struggling to work out its identity, and the role of Islam, not just since
independence in 1947, but even before, when the idea of a separate nation for South Asian Muslims was first raised. Tackling
the many issues that confront Pakistan will be a complex and lengthy process, and not one
that can be answered by the simplistic narrative (and I’m doing a Google consensus here) that it just needs to
send its army into North Waziristan and all will be well. Sending the military into North Waziristan to destroy a safe base for al
Qaeda and Afghan militants may help the United States stabilise Afghanistan, but many Pakistanis argue – rightly or wrongly – that it
will not help Pakistan stabilise Pakistan. And
finally there is India, which increasingly hates to be
hyphenated with Pakistan as it pursues its own trajectory as a growing economic power, but
which is also intimately bound up in Pakistan’s idea of itself. No Western leader, with a struggling economy
at home, can afford to ignore India’s economic potential – as British Prime Minister David Cameron made clear in his visit to India in
July. The administration of President Barack Obama – who according to Rob Woodward’s “Obama’s Wars” was very
clear about the centrality of the India-Pakistan relationship in determining the outcome in
Afghanistan – very early on dropped the idea, under Indian pressure, of appointing a special envoy for Afghanistan, Pakistan
and India/Kashmir. Yet how much of our understanding of the relationship between Pakistan and India is “true” in some kind of
objective sense, and how much is it influenced by the changing attitude of Western countries in their enthusiasm for tapping into
Indian economic growth – so much so that they dare not even utter the word “Kashmir”? I should wrap up now and end with two
more questions. What will the 21st century equivalent of Edward Said tell us about the period between 9/11 and July 2011 that we
should have understood but did not see? And at what points did that blindness undermine policy decisions?
Policymaking
Status quo policymaking embraces the myth of model minority, ignoring the
plight of Asian Americans while simultaneously justifying the oppression and
poor living conditions other minorities face
Thrupkaew 2 – Prospect Senior Correspondent (March 25, 2002, Noy Thrupkaew, “The Myth
of Model Minority,” http://prospect.org/article/myth-model-minority), ABC
The Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC), an advocacy group in ¶ Washington, estimates that more than 2.2 million
Southeast Asians now live in the¶ United States. They are the largest group of refugees in the country and the ¶ fastest-growing
minority. Yet
for most policy makers, the plight of the many Mali ¶ Keos has been overshadowed
by the well-known success of the Asian immigrants who¶ came before and engendered the
myth of the "model minority." Indeed,¶ conservatives have exploited this racial stereotype --
arguing that Asians fare¶ well in the United States because of their strong "family values" and
work ethic.¶ These values, they say, and not government assistance, are what all minorities¶ need in order to get ahead.¶
Paradoxically, Southeast Asians -- supposedly part of the model minority -- ¶ may be suffering
most from the resulting public policies. They have been left in¶ the hands of underfunded
community-assistance programs and government agencies¶ that, in one example of well-intentioned incompetence,
churn out forms in Khmer¶ and Lao for often illiterate populations. But fueled by outrage over bad services ¶ and a fraying social
safety-net, Southeast Asian immigrants have started to¶ embrace that most American of activities, political protest -- by pushing for¶
research on their communities, advocating for their rights, and harnessing their ¶ political power.¶ The model-minority
myth has persisted in large part because¶ political conservatives are so attached to it. "Asian
Americans have become the¶ darlings of the right," said Frank Wu, a law professor at Howard
University and¶ the author of Yellow: Race beyond Black and White. "The model-minority
myth and¶ its depiction of Asian-American success tells a reassuring story about our¶ society
working."¶ The flip side is also appealing to the right. Because Asian Americans'¶ success stems
from their strong families and their dedication to education and ¶ hard work, conservatives
say, then the poverty of Latinos and African Americans ¶ must be explained by their own
"values": They are poor because of their¶ nonmarrying, school-skipping, and generally lazy
and irresponsible behavior,¶ which government handouts only encourage.¶ The model-minority myth's
"racist love," as author Frank Chin terms it, took¶ hold at a sensitive point in U.S. history: after the 1965 Watts riots and
the¶ immigration reforms of that year, which selectively allowed large numbers of¶ educated
immigrants into the United States. Highly skilled South and East Asian¶ nurses, doctors, and
engineers from countries like India and China began pouring ¶ into the United States just as
racial tensions were at a fever pitch.¶ Shortly thereafter, articles like "Success Story of One
Minority in the U.S.,"¶ published by U.S. News & World Report in 1966, trumpeted: "At a time
when¶ it is being proposed that hundreds of billions be spent to uplift Negroes and ¶ other
minorities, the nation's 300,000 Chinese Americans are moving ahead on ¶ their own, with no
help from anyone else." Newsweek in 1971 had Asian¶ Americans "outwhiting the whites." And Fortune in 1986 dubbed
them a¶ "superminority." As Wu caricatures the model-minority myth in his book: ¶ Asian Americans vindicate the American Dream...
. They are¶ living proof of the power of the free market and the absence of racial ¶ discrimination. Their good fortune flows from
individual self-reliance and¶ community self-sufficiency, not civil-rights activism or government welfare ¶ benefits.
Russia
Modern depictions of Russia are grounded in “deep Orientalist roots” – this
forecloses our ability to cooperate or warm relations with Russia as the social
hegemon depicts them as other and “not quite Western”
Pavlov 16, (Not That Different: Orientalism Hinders Relations Between West and Russia),
https://sputniknews.com/blogs/201601211033505248-orientalism-russia-west/ jl
Some political leaders in the West often don’t seem to have a proper understanding of Russia, its
politics and culture. This lack of insightful knowledge leads to biased views and prejudiced anti-
Russian policies toward the world’s largest country. Many see Russia a wild place, where things are
bizarre and the minds of people are inherently different from those of Westerners. This poor
understanding and distorted view of Russia has deep roots in Orientalism, a concept introduced by famous
Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said. I think Orientalism is one of the key reasons why the West has developed the
fundamentally inaccurate view of Russia.
Orientalism is used predominantly by Western intellectuals to
pick and choose certain aspects of Eastern cultures and construct the stereotypical perception
of all non-Western societies as the one uniform East, or the Orient. Although there is a huge difference among
various Eastern cultures, Orientalism overlooks cultural differences, seeing them essentially as one monolithic, never-changing and
primitive East. Professor Said
originally described the Middle East and India to be the Orient;
however, the term could be expanded and include almost any culture outside of North America
and Western Europe. According to Professor Said, the West constructs the idea of the East. The East is
seen from a prejudiced and one-dimensional point of view, which includes the over-
exaggeration of differences between the two civilizations and the assumption that the West is
inherently superior to the East. Although Russia is clearly different from the Orient, described by Professor Said, many of
his arguments could be effectively applied to explain the Anglo-American perspective on Russia, its culture and people. During the
Cold War era, the Russian civilization was seen as part of the East. However, even after the breakup of the Soviet Union not much
has changed. Due to its geographical location, unique history, differences in religion and culture, Russia
is still seen as a
different and not quite “European” nation in the eyes of the West. Looking at Russia through the lenses of Orientalism,
the West exaggerates differences that exist between itself and Russia. Orientalism is a key factor why a lot of
Western politicians misunderstand Russian politics, seeing them as bizarre, unpredictable and
utterly different from those in the West. The Orientalist narrative depicts Russian politicians
as “savages,” incapable of embracing Western values. In the back of their minds, Western Orientalists still think
that Russians, the “barbarians from the East,” want to conquer the Western world, as did the Huns, Mongols and Ottomans before
them. Orientalism served to construct the negative image of Russia on the international level. Many Westerners see Russians as the
“Others,” people who are lazy, crazy and incompetent of governing themselves. Western media and the film industry perpetuate
certain myths about Russians to the point that these stereotypes have become almost “factual”. Russia’s “inferiority” is shown
through the use of demeaning language. When writing about Russian politics, the Guardian and other Western media used
degrading epithets to describe the political circle of the Russian president as “Putin’s clan.” The use of such language preserves the
sense of primitivism. Interestingly, while a group of non-kin related Russian statesmen are referred as a “clan,” the father and son
Bush presidents were referred to as “The Bush Administrations.” Looking at Russia through the lens of Orientalism, the West won’t
effectively work with Moscow on equal terms. If Western leaders and intellectuals keep falling back on the
Orientalist narrative to understand Russia, its culture and people, constantly depicting the country’s
politics as “backward” and “irrational,” no good is going to come out of it, just more misunderstandings, assumptions
and conflict.
The advantage is classic threat projection. Insecurities are sourced with Russia
to maintain a separation between dangerous others and secure selves.
O’Tuathail 2k (Gearoid, Professor of Geography – Virginia Tech University, “The Postmodern
Geopolitical Condition: States, Statecraft, and Security at the Millennium”, Annals of the
Association of American Geographers, March,
http://www.nvc.vt.edu/toalg/Website/Publish/papers/millennium.htm)
For critical geopoliticians, a pertinent question that touches upon the same issue is how deterritorialized dangers are constructed
and represented by “national security” institutions. One interesting feature of deterritorialized
threat discourse –
with its stock images of worldwide conspiracies , terrorist networks, and prohibited weapons of
mass destruction – is the tendency to return these threats to a territorial register, to pour formless global threats
into old territorial bottles. Thus, for example, the question of managing the hazards posed by aging Cold War military-
industrial complexes becomes a question of “nuclear leakage” in Russia only. Likewise, the threat
from weapons of mass destruction becomes a question of containing “rogue states” (even though the
equipment and scientists making these weapons are often Western). The threat of transnational terrorism becomes the threat of
foreign states sponsoring terrorism (even though many terrorists are domestic). The general tendency is to
project the
threat as being “out there” with “them,” without acknowledging that the threat is also “in here” with “us.” The
threat to all posed by our own aging and toxic weapons complex is rarely conceptualized or addressed by security intellectuals. [3]
Fundamental questions about the production, distribution and management of risks, the heretofore unseen and unproblematized
products of our Cold War technoscientific modernity, are not confronted. A territorial logic of “here” and “there” and an
easy
ethnocentric hubris that has “us” as different and superior from “them” still enframes many
contemporary Western security discourses (Shapiro 1997).
STEM
The Aff’s Model minority discourse constructs the Asian Invasion discourse,
which furthers a neoliberal agenda
Patel 14 (Rushika V., 2014, “Neoliberal globalization, racism and education: The model minority
thesis in education policy”,
http://search.proquest.com/openview/b675fa54acdab75ecf95cdc3ad0316fe/1?pq-
origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y) HDS
The flip side of the
model minority discourse is the “Asian Invasion” discourse (Okihiro, 1994; Kawai, 2005).
Throughout US history, and in popular culture in particular, there has been a perpetual fear of
Asians outnumbering the whites, outperforming the whites, and ultimately taking over the
whites. Consider for example, late 19th century discourses about “Yellow Peril” and “Hindoo Invasion”
with the more recent “China-bashing” rhetoric in the Obama-Romney presidential debates. (Takaki, 1998; Bohan,
2012) In education, Asian Invasion discourse is related to the rise of testing and evaluation
regimes as well as a generalized anxiety, across the STEM fields in particular, that associates
students in China and India as unilaterally outperforming US students. (Dillon, 2010) The kind of
fear mongering associated with the model minority/Asian invasion dialectic creates a host of
fears about the status and future of the US economy, job market and its role as global
superpower within the popular US imagination (Prashad, 2002). These fears are largely framed to
support the rise of neoliberal education policies and testing regimes as a “defense” against the
rising economies.
Space
Securitizing China’s space interests creates an “US vs Them” dichotomy – that
causes space weaponization and increases the likelihood of conflict
Pomeroy 15 (Caleb - Postgraduate Student at University College London - NASA Langley
Research Center. “Discursively Constructing a Space Threat: ‘China Threat’ and U.S. Security”, E-
International Relations Student, http://www.e-ir.info/2015/06/06/discursively-constructing-a-
space-threat-china-threat-u-s-security/)
In 2001, the Rumsfeld Commission warned of the threat of a possible “space Pearl Harbor,” outlining the U.S. as the most space-
dependent country in the world and suggesting that the U.S. Department of Defense establish an “Under Secretary of Defense for
Space, Intelligence, and Information” (Rumsfeld Commission, 2001, pp. 8, 32-33). In 2003, China launched its first astronaut into
orbit and, in 2007, tested an anti-satellite weapon (ASAT) that destroyed a decommissioned Fengyun-1C weather satellite and
caused the most severe orbital debris cloud in space flight history (CRS, 2014). In January of 2014, General William Shelton,
commander of the U.S. Air Force Space Command, explained that while electronic jammers and laser attacks could reduce satellite
capabilities, “direct attack weapons, like the Chinese anti-satellite system, can destroy [U.S.] space systems” (“U.S. military
satellites,” 2014, para. 5). General Shelton reiterated that mankind has consistently created conflict in every medium at its disposal,
from land to sea, undersea to air, and now cyber and outer space. There are few instances in history where an emerging power did
not enter conflict with an existing power (Karabell, 2013). As China reemerges as an international power, it is natural to question
whether or not the U.S. and China will engage in conflict. However, asking if China’s reemergence is a threat to U.S. security interests
may not be the best way to approach this issue. In fact, even defining U.S. security interests could cause an inherent
threat to those supposed interests. This essay will argue that defining U.S. security interests can
threaten the U.S., and
this question’s discursive construction increases the risk of a U.S.-China conflict. A wide range of case studies could be used to
illustrate these arguments to approach the question of U.S.-China conflict; this essay will look at the contemporary issue of space
security as it is currently receiving historically high levels of attention in Beijing and Washington. Defining U.S. Security Interests Can
Threaten the U.S. Defining a set of U.S. security interests can bias U.S. perception of Chinese activities. Once the U.S. outlines specific
security interests, Chinese activities are interpreted and evaluated by the U.S. relative to those outlined interests. A lucid example of
this has unfolded over the past decade; the summary of the Congressional Research Service’s 2014 report entitled Threats to U.S.
National Security Interests in Space: Orbital Debris Mitigation and Removal explains that the growing population of space debris
“threatens U.S. national security interests in space, both governmental (military, intelligence, and civil) and commercial.” The U.S.
criticized the 2007 Chinese ASAT test; National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe states that the “U.S. believes China’s
development and testing of such weapons is inconsistent with the spirit of cooperation that both countries aspire to in the civil
space area” (Kaufman & Linzer, 2007, para. 4). With U.S. satellite assets defined as a security interest, it was only natural that
many American analysts interpreted this test as a deliberate step made by the Chinese towards a counterspace
capability to offset U.S. conventional military superiority as well as an attempt to force the U.S. into space arms
treaty negotiations. However, Gregory Kulacki and Jeffrey Lewis (2008) conducted interviews with Chinese officials who
were close to the anti-satellite program and found American commentators tended to place too much
importance on the U.S. as a driver in China’s test. This ASAT test, coupled with NASA Administrator Michael
Griffin being denied access to the Shenzhou launch facility in 2006, caused the U.S. to sever cooperative ties with the Chinese
National Space Agency. Griffin, in turn, had to resort to claiming the prospect of competition with China to obtain U.S. Congressional
support for NASA’s cooperative initiatives (Kulacki and Lewis, 2008). Therefore, the U.S. defining security interests, such as its
satellite assets, encourages the U.S.’s interpretation of China’s actions, such as the 2007 ASAT test, as a threat. In this example, the
result was a further distancing of Washington from Beijing and a severing of space ties between two of the most space active nations
in the world. Defining a set of U.S. security interests can bias the space security conversation towards the U.S.; China’s actions would
be interpreted relative to the U.S.’s supposed security
interests, constructing China as the aggressor. For
example, with satellite assets outlined as a security interest, the U.S.
interprets China’s 2007 ASAT test as
threatening to that interest. Yet, space debris in low Earth orbit threatens all nations with orbital satellite assets—
not just the U.S. In fact, the 2007 ASAT test caused debris that damaged a Russian satellite six years later (CRS, 2014). Elizabeth
Economy and Adam Segal (2009) stress the importance of the U.S. working with the international community when approaching
Chinese security issues, as opposed to framing the issue as U.S.-China specific. They suggest the Obama administration “sit down
with Japan, the European Union, and other key allies to begin coordinating their policies towards China” to enjoy more policy
success, emphasizing that many countries have realized their relationship with Beijing cannot be bilaterally negotiated (Economy &
Segal, 2009, p. 20). An issue like satellite debris cannot be negotiated bilaterally, and the U.S. defining its satellite assets as a security
interest can bias the security conversation towards the U.S., making it more likely that China be constructed as an aggressor. If the
security conversation is framed as Chinese aggression towards U.S. security interests, the U.S can monopolize an international issue,
like satellite debris. This Question’s Discursive Construction Increases the Risk of Conflict The
question of whether or not
China’s reemergence is threatening to U.S. security interests is discursively constructed to threaten the
U.S. The possible answers to this question lead to conflict; answering that China is threatening could lead to a security dilemma—a
situation where the U.S.’s attempts to heighten its own security could evoke similar defensive responses from China, increasing the
risk of conflict (Glaser, 1997). Defense analysts cite China’s emerging threat in space as a primary reason for the U.S. to weaponize
space. However, Hui Zhang of Harvard’s Kennedy School (2008, p. 31) asserts “U.S. space weaponization plans will have disastrous
consequences for international security and the peaceful use of outer space.” She concludes that this would evoke appropriate
defense measures by China, which could lead to a space arms race (Zhang, 2008, p. 40). Given this question’s discursive
construction, answering that China is a threat to U.S. security interests could cause a security dilemma that
heightens the risk of conflict. On the other hand, if
one answers that China is not a threat, the U.S. risks
becoming ambivalent and could face an increasing perceived threat from China. U.S. Air Force General William
Shelton explains that U.S. military satellites are effectively defenseless, and an attack would severely limit the U.S.’s civil,
commercial, and military capabilities (“U.S. military satellites,” 2014). A report on the People’s Liberation Army’s space strategy
published by the American Enterprise Institute (Wortzel, 2007) concludes that evidence exists that the PLA is preparing as though
they might have to militarily engage the U.S. in space, citing weapons tests, legal justifications, and PLA literature as evidence. The
report argues that justifications exist for the U.S. to develop space weapons systems, whether for defensive measures or offensive
capabilities in future space conflicts. If the U.S. becomes ambivalent while China develops space arms, a U.S. perception of a China
threat in space could increase as China becomes better armed relative to the U.S. Yet, as Zhang (2008) argues, arming space will
likely evoke a military response from China. Therefore, even answering this essay’s question of a possible China threat in the
affirmative or negative increases the risk of conflict. This question’s discursive construction forces the use of
the terms “U.S.” and “China,” creating a “Self” and “Other” paradigm which places the two
states in opposition; the debate over whether or not China is a threat to U.S. security interests is often expressed in the U.S.
by using the language of America as “us” and China as “them.” Jisheng Sun (2014) argues that previously, when China was
considered an ideological partner, such as under the Nationalist Government of Chiang Kai-shek, U.S. policymakers
used the term “we” to describe the two states. When referring to China’s rise today, China is often referred to as the
“Other,” in comparison to the “Self” of the U.S. The “Other” portrays the “U.S.-imposed ideological dichotomy between itself and
China, identifying the latter as different and even contradictory to the U.S.” (Sun, 2014, p. 87). The policy discourse of the
“Self” and “Other” simplifies and polarizes and can increase the speed and intensity of security dilemma
dynamics between the U.S. and China (Johnston, 2013). This language creates American unipolarity where China’s threat reputation
leads to out-group status, which in turn fuels perceptions of China as threatening . Intensifying threat
perception increases a possible security dilemma, and security-conscious Chinese political elites are acutely aware of the security
costs of dangerous foreign attributions to China’s character (Deng, 2006, p. 187). The “Self” versus “Other” paradigm distances
Washington from Beijing and discursively places the two states in opposition.
Speech
The speech act of the 1AC acts as a justification for intervention in the East –
justifying endless forms of dominance and war
McDonald 08
Matt, “International Relations at University of Queensland, co-author Ethics & Global Security,
co-editor @AJPandH.” Securitization and the Construction of Security, European Journal of
International Relations Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications and ECPR-European Consortium for
Political Research, Vol. 14(4): 563–587 [DOI: 10.1177/1354066108097553]// li cao. gw
In the securitization framework, issues become security issues at a particular moment. When this moment is may be up for question
and based on particular readings of the Copenhagen School literature itself: it may be at the point when
an issue is defined
as a security issue (the speech act), at the point where an audience ‘backs up’ or acquiesces to
that designation of threat, or at the point at which extraordinary measures are implemented. UK Prime Minister Tony
Blair’s securitization of Saddam Hussein’s ‘WMD programme’ for the British public in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion is a useful
case study here. Depending on our reading of the Copenhagen School, the
‘securitization’ of Saddam and his
‘WMD programme’ may have occurred exclusively through public representations depicting
the regime and its WMD programme as imminently threatening, through the vote in Parliament
legitimizing Blair’s deployment of troops, or even at the point of invasion itself. While the latter might seem the least likely reading,
in Regions and Powers Buzan and Wæver (2003: 73) look for examples of securitization in the execution of emergency measures
themselves rather than in the discursive construction of threat or societal acquiescence to these speech acts .
The potential
tensions between a focus on speech, acceptance or emergency measures maps on to an
earlier point about the problematic relationship between speaker, audience and action. The
important point to note here, however, is that the moment of securitization is relatively specifically defined: issues become security
threats at particular instances. Such an explicit or ‘decisionistic’ (Williams, 2003: 521) approach to the point at which threats are
designated is not without its appeal. At times, radical changes in articulations of security and threat occur in global politics, as
responses to perceived moments of political crisis for example.16 Yet focusing on the moment at which an issue becomes a security
issue is analytically problematic for at least three reasons. First, issues can come to be viewed as security issues
or threats over an extended period of time . As Didier Bigo (2002) has argued, issues can become
institutionalized as security issues or threats without dramatic moments of intervention.
Using the example of the construction of immigrants as a security threat, Bigo suggests that
the incorporation of issues relating to immigration within the jurisdiction of security
professionals such as the police and the military should be viewed as central to the
construction of this issue as a security threat . Jef Huysmans (2006) makes a similar point in his argument
concerning the institutionalization of immigration as a security threat in the European context. Such potentially long-term
processes and practices fit uneasily within the securitization framework with its focus on
‘moments’ of intervention and the suspension of normal politics. Second, and again echoing an earlier
point, focusing on the moment of intervention does not help us understand how or why that particular intervention became
possible at that moment. Why then, and in that context, did a particular actor represent an issue as an existential threat, and more
importantly why was that actor supported in that securitization by a particular constituency?17 Lipschutz (1995: 8), for example,
defines discourses of security and threat as ‘the products of historical structures and processes, of struggles for power within states,
of conflicts between the societal groupings that inhabit states and the interests that besiege them’. By contrast, for the Copenhagen
School we can apply and understand a particular instance of securitization without exploring fundamentally the contexts within
which these interventions were possible in the first place. This would seem inconsistent with a broader understanding of the (inter-
subjective) processes through which security is constructed in different contexts. Finally ,
a focus on the ‘moment’ at
which an issue becomes a security issue and enters the realm of ‘panic politics’ is problematic
because of the dichotomies it represents between security and politics . As Rita Abrahamsen (2005: 59)
has argued, focusing on a moment at which an issue ceases to bea political issue and becomes a security one suggests an either/or
approach to politics in which there are no gradations or continuums of issue/problem/threat. Issues may be viewed as risks, for
example, before being depicted as threats. Such a conceptualization suggests a particular way of approaching that issue,18 but for
the securitization framework the only fundamental difference is between an issue that is a political issue and one that is a security
threat. A focus on the ‘moment’ here contributes to this narrow vision of political prioritization and a problematic dichotomy
between politics and security. This dichotomy might look even more problematic if taken outside the realm of liberal democratic
Western states, which has provided the site for the development of the framework and is the overwhelming focus of its
application.19 The
example of the Australian government’s approach to asylum-seekers arriving
by boat in 2001 provides a useful example of the limitations of the focus on the moment of
discursive intervention. The dramatic naval blockade of a cargo ship — the Tampa — which
had rescued over 400 asylum-seekers attempting to reach Australia by boat in August 2001
captured international headlines and seemed a clear example of securitization. The blockade —
entailing the deployment of the military and the rejection of elements of international refugee law — was accompanied by language
from the highest levels of government depicting asylum-seekers as an immediate threat to security. Yet
while we seem to
have securitizing moves, audience consent, and extraordinary measures in a relatively limited
period of time (August–September 2001), the focus on this moment obscures or ignores crucial
elements of the construction of security. Asylum-seekers in Australia had arguably been positioned as a security
threat since at least the mid1990s, evidenced in the anti-immigration rhetoric of the right-wing nationalist Pauline Hanson and
manifested in the establishment of detention centres for the incarceration of asylum-seekers. At best
for the
securitization framework, these developments created a context in which the conservative
government’s ‘securitization’ of asylum in 2001 became possible. At worst, asylum-seekers
had been positioned as security threats incrementally, a process beginning well before the
dramatic events and ‘securitizing’ language of August–September 2001.20 At this level, it might be suggested that
the securitization framework does not provide us with the tools for understanding some of the most important dynamics of that
which it proposes to explain.
Taiwan
The aff’s approach to Taiwanese conflict is structured by violent Westphalian
understandings of sovereignty that make war inevitable
Pan 10 (Chengxin Pan, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the School of Humanities
and Social Sciences, Deakin University, “Westphalia and the Taiwan Conundrum: A Case against
the Exclusionist Construction of Sovereignty and Identity,” Journal of Chinese Political Science,
December 2010, Volume 15, Issue 4, pp 380–383)
In cross-strait relations, Westphalian
sovereignty is precisely such a “common meaning,” which can similarly explain
the very lack of consensus between Beijing and Taipei. It is in this sense that I argue that the link between
Westphalian sovereignty and conflict needs to be more fully understood. As many scholars have noted, sovereign states and war
often go hand in hand. For Charles Tilly, “war made the state and the state made war” ([30], 42). In a similar vein, Michael Howard
argues that “no Nation, in the true sense of the word, could be born without war” ([57], 102, emphasis in original). By “the true
sense of the word,” there is little doubt that Howard means the Westphalian sovereign state. The irony here is that while the
Westphalian state is defined by its ability to monopolize the legitimate use of violence, the process in which to acquire that
monopoly is frequently fraught with violence ([58], 59). Admittedly, the Westphalian model of sovereignty is not meant to
incite war or violence. Quite the opposite, Bodin’s idea of sovereignty was designed to find a cure to the scourge of religious conflict
that had ravaged France at the time. For Thomas Hobbes, the main political purpose of the sovereign state (the Leviathan) was to
maintain internal order. Similarly, through a clear demarcation of sovereignty on the basis of territory and the reciprocal
recognition of sovereignty, the Treaty of Westphalia was aimed primarily to settle Europe’s prolonged religious disputes. That said,
while Westphalia helps regulate violence by restricting the monopoly of violence and war-making to territorial states only, it does
not quite succeed in stopping war or violence per se. As Susan Strange observed, internally it “did nothing to stop
conflicts over the major sources of revenue and wealth for the state” ([59], 347). Indeed, in his study of the relationship between
identity and violence in Bosnia, David Campbell goes so far as to argue that the conventional understanding of sovereignty and
territorial identity was largely responsible for both ethnic cleansing and slow international intervention in the Balkans [60]. Even as
the sovereign state manages to establish order domestically, it can be argued that human violence is merely displaced
“from within the territory of the state into the realm of interstate relations” ([61], 440). The reason why Westphalian
sovereignty is intimately linked to conflict is straightforward. To begin with, Westphalian sovereignty , understood as final
authority, does not allow for compromise where sovereignty is believed to be at stake. A struggle for final
authority is by definition a mutually exclusive, zero-sum game. Hobbes observes that “If any two men desire
the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies” ([62], 184). Thanks to the diffusion of the
Westphalian norm, sovereign authority is precisely such a commonly desired thing and cannot be jointly enjoyed. As
such, its exclusive ownership often needs to be settled by “the victory of one side over the other, a victory that makes the one
sovereign and the other subject” ([1], 98). In international relations, there are numerous examples of this type of zero-sum struggle
for sovereignty. Take the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians for instance, the indivisible characteristic of sovereignty was
likened by a former Tel Aviv lawyer to a “woman,” who cannot be shared ([63], 66). This analogy, while rather crude, does strike at
the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian problem, a problem which, according to Anthony Burke, has
much to do with “the
conceptual foundations Israel shares with other states—with the modern [Westphalian] ontology of the secure
nation-state” ([63], 70–1). Such a zero-sum struggle for exclusive sovereignty is also manifested in the contentious
and potentially explosive Taiwan issue. During much of the Cold War period, the two sides, informed by the Westphalian
idea of exclusive sovereign authority, pretended that the other did not even exist as a political entity, let
alone as an equal. The KMT government in Taiwan viewed the People’s Republic as a bunch of “Communist bandits” (gongfei) and
pursued a policy of “three no’s” vis-à-vis the mainland: no official contacts, no negotiations, and no compromise. Likewise, Beijing
regarded Taiwan as little more than a “renegade province.” In the fight over the seat in the United Nations in the early 1970s,
mainland China insisted that it would not join unless Taipei was expelled (Taipei buchu, Beijing buru). The Taiwan authorities, after
losing the UN votes, decided to withdraw from the UN rather than accepting a proposal of dual representation, on the ground that
“There is no room for patriots and traitors to live together” (Han zei bu liangli) ([81], 108). With final authority believed to be at
stake, compromise has thus been routinely ruled out by both sides as a sign of weakness or even
surrender. In a 1997 interview with Asian Affairs, then Chinese President Jiang Zemin made this point clear: “You have here a
case where the fundamental interests of a nation lie. On such a question involving state sovereignty, a government has no room for
any compromise” [64]. Echoing this stance, a group of scholars at an influential think tank in Beijing argued that “we are not willing
to see the loss of the principle of single sovereignty—the inseparability of sovereignty…. If any compromises are made with regard to
Taiwan, they will not be made over the question of sovereignty and the one China principle, which is the key to the problem” ([38],
134). Likewise, in reference to Beijing’s “one country, two systems” proposal, the Taiwan authorities made an uncompromising,
mirror-image response: “the purpose of ‘one country, two systems’ is to demand the ROC’s complete surrender to the Chinese
Communists…. Therefore, this piece of proposal from the Chinese Communists is in fact impractical in the objective sense, and
absolutely unacceptable to us in the subjective sense” [65]. Thus, this unwillingness to make compromise, which in large degree
accounts for the Taiwan impasse, is clearly derived from the Westphalian notion of exclusionary
sovereignty. Second, also complicating this zero-sum standoff is the aforementioned Westphalian nexus between sovereignty
and territory. If the struggle over sovereignty already precludes compromise, then the Westphalian territorialization of sovereignty
makes such a struggle even more diametrically Manichaean: either a state possesses sovereignty over a particular piece of territory,
or it doesn’t ([61], 439). Just as there
is no room for compromise over final authority, so there is no space for
territorial ambiguity;
sovereignty, in the Westphalian sense of the word, has to be clearly demarcated along
a geographical boundary that separates “self” from “Other .” This helps us understand not only why
territorial integrity has been at the core of the “one China” principle, but also why, despite ever-increasing economic links,
solutions to many territorial disputes in Asia still remain elusive ([16], 121). Third, given that the Westphalian
ideal entails the convergence between the state and the nation, not only is the struggle over sovereignty concerned with territory,
but it is also about national identity. As noted before, a central part of the modern narrative of state sovereignty has been about
popular sovereignty, in which final authority is allegedly invested with the nation. To the extent that Westphalian
sovereignty implies that the nation’s identity and survival hinges on territorial sovereignty, a
struggle for the latter then becomes a matter of life and death for the former . As the argument goes,
if “A stateless person in the statecentric world is a nonperson” ([66], 245). then a stateless nation in the Westphalian state system
would be no nation at all. To compromise on sovereignty and territorial integrity thus amounts to nothing short of treason or
national suicide. In this sense, it is not difficult to understand why the struggle for the olive trees on the banks of the river Jordan,
emblematic of a fight over people’s sense of home and identity, has been so venomous ([67], 27). Equally, it is also easy to
understand why the territorial status of Taiwan has taken on such monumental significance for both sides. An influential book on
Taiwan independence, The Four-Hundred-Year History of the Taiwanese by Shih Ming, argues that unless the Taiwanese establish
their own country, the future of the nation will remain wretched and uncertain ([68], 150). Without doubt, such a direct appeal to
national identity and survival has contributed a great deal to the further hardening of the resolve of many Taiwanese for national
self-determination. Indeed, it was precisely on the basis of the democratic right to national self-determination that the Taiwan
authorities under Lee Teng-hui and Chen Shui-bian were able to strenuously refuse to negotiate with Beijing on the prospects of
reunification
Terror
The aff’s perception of terrorism relies on elites securitizing immigrants as
national security threats
Messina 14, Anthony, (He has the following credentials: Ph.D., Mass. Institute of Technology
(1984) M.A., Drew Univ. (1977) B.A., Assumption College (1975)) World Politics 66, no. 3 ( July
2014), 530–59 Copyright © 2014 Trustees of Princeton University
doi:10.1017/S0043887114000148//li cao. gw
There is probably no single “fact” on which most of the authors in the collected volumes under
review and other securitization scholars explicitly agree other than that political elite discourse
has securitized immigration-related issues in recent years, especially since September 11.
Although opinions diverge somewhat about the specific motives inspiring such discourse, the
conventional wisdom is that numerous mainstream politicians and extreme right political
actors have rhetorically exploited September 11 and other terrorist-related events in a
deliberate and calculated manner. As Phizacklea (p. 7) summarizes this perspective in her
concluding remarks in Security, Insecurity and Migration in Europe: “In the face of an increased
securitization-migration nexus (a securitization which becomes ever more elaborate
technologically) migrants are cast as a cultural/criminal/terrorist threat and, in these
recessionary times, a threat to economic stability.” According to Toğral (p. 219) in his
contribution to the same volume, the elite-driven “‘war on terror’ has not only linked
migration to terrorism, it has also consolidated the place of migration as a threat to cultural
identity.” Hampshire (p. 118) further argues in his essay in Immigration Policy and Security that
the “government-led securitization of migration . . . has been used to legitimize extra-ordinary
policies, especially in the field of asylum and migrants’ rights.” Moreover, in Faist’s view, elites
have elevated immigration to the status of a “meta-issue,” or an overarching concern in which
the boundaries of immigration as an external and internal security threat have become
substantially blurred.23Given this general consensus, two critical and interrelated questions can
be posed. First, is there concrete and compelling evidence that Western political elites have
deliberately and systematically plotted to securitize immigration-related issues? Second, if elites
indeed have attempted to securitize immigration-related issues, what are their primary
motives? In response to the first question it is not unfair to conclude that most of the evidence
of elite securitizing moves alluded to or presented in the collected volumes is anecdotal,
episodic, unsystematically gathered, and/or difficult to compare across national cases. Moreover
and more importantly, it is unclear if the aforementioned evidence, as scant as it is, supports the
argument that elites have conducted a series of purposeful and sustained campaigns to
convince the general public that immigrants constitute an omnipresent security threat and one
that requires the urgent implementation of extraordinary policy measures. To be sure, and as
chronicled in the works of Chebel d’Appollonia, Hampshire, Toğral, and others,24 political elite
discourse about immigrants has often been inflammatory since September 11 and other, more
recent terrorist events. There is no denying that numerous mainstream politicians and extreme
right political actors have rhetorically linked domestic terrorist-related incidents to mass
immigration and immigrant settlement; illiberal, intolerant, and incendiary statements by such
politicians are abundantly represented within the contemporary public record across the major
immigration-receiving countries. This said, not every contributor to the collected readings fully
accepts the conventional wisdom, which suggests the existence of a pervasive, orchestrated,
and sustained elite campaigns to securitize immigration. Boswell, for one, argues that “despite
some initial attempts to link terrorism and migration, political discourse on migration control . . .
has remained surprisingly untouched by the anti-terrorist agenda.”25 Her analysis of post–
September 11 elite discourse in Britain, Germany, and Spain leads her to conclude that, in
contrast to the US, “discourse on migration control in Europe does not appear to have become
securitized as a result of 9/11 or the subsequent terrorist attacks in Madrid and London.”26
Perhaps even more persuasively, Bourbeau’s (p. 74) comprehensive catalog of the incidents
when heads of state, heads of government, and interior and/or other relevant government
cabinet ministers executed securitization moves in Canada and France between 1989 and 2005
reveals that the securitizing speech acts of elites were sporadic: for example, despite the
terrorist bombings in France in 1995 as well as the events of September 11, 2001, France’s
prime minister, Lionel Jospin, made no securitization moves during his tenure in office from
1997 through 2002; similarly, although 80 percent of all elite securitizing moves in the Canadian
case postdate September 11, they nevertheless were not executed “on a systematic and
repeated-over-time basis . . . [and] have remained relatively low since then.” In short, while it is
all well and good to underscore that political elites can and occasionally do make securitizing
moves, it is quite another thing to assume, as securitization theorists often do, that such moves
are calculated and/ or sustained over time. With respect to their motives, the securitization of
immigration literature generally assumes that Western politicians engage in discourses that
frame immigrants as an existential, material, and/or physical threat for self-interested
political reasons and/or in order to enhance the legitimacy of their privileged position.27 As
Boswell (in Givens, Freeman, and Leal, 94) describes this widely embraced perspective:
“Securitization legitimizes the state in its attempt to introduce more restrictive measures ”;
furthermore, it “provides an opportunity for consolidating categories of collective
identification and helps mobilize support for the relevant political community, generating
greater loyalty or patriotism through the definition of a common threat.” As mentioned above,
it is frequently asserted that such securitizing discourse is consciously intended to facilitate the
transfer of immigration-related issues from the realm of conventional politics to that of
emergency politics where they can be addressed and resolved outside of the normal policy-
making procedures. As a result, it thus matters very much whether political elites act
purposefully whenever they rhetorically link immigration to security, since in the absence of
such evidence a central tenet of securitization theory—that is, focusing events inspire or
facilitate strategically motivated elite securitizing speech acts—remains unproven.
Warming
The aff’s apocalyptic climate rhetoric is constructed for national security
purposes—it ensures military buildup
Mayer, 12 – research associate at the Bonn University Department of Political Science
(Maximilian, “Chaotic Climate Change and Security,” International Political Sociology 6, 165–185,
2012)//HK
Securitizing Climate Change The specter of chaos and an unpredictable climate also began to haunt
national security communities, which have been quick to digest the spectacular insights put
forward by a small but growing fraction of climatologists. In 2003, the Pentagon commissioned a
consultancy study, which artfully employed what the Copenhagen School refers to as the ‘‘rhetoric of survival.’’
Its authors predict the advent of a nuclear war resulting from a fast shutdown of the ocean conveyor belt in the northern
Atlantic (Schwartz and Randall 2003). Subsequent populist works such as Lyna’s Six Degrees, Pearce’s The Last Generation, and Lovelock’s
Revenge of Gaia produced powerful narratives that embraced a similarly existentialist language . John
Houghton, who served for the IPCC as cochairman of the first working group, called climate change ‘‘a weapon of mass
destruction’’ in contradiction to the linear orthodoxy to which most of his colleagues and the IPCC reports still adhered. He accused the
American and British leaders of neglecting their ‘‘duty above all others, (…) to protect the security of their peoples’’ (Brown 2003). Similarly, the
vast majority of think tanks, NGOs, and research institutes portrayed climate change first and
foremost as a national security issue.10 Since 2003, Western military and strategic communities have started connecting rapid
climate shifts with national strategy and power politics. Their scenarios were based on ‘‘a decidedly post-equilibrium world, buffeted by greater or
lesser degrees of turbulence’’ with profound implications for the US grand strategy (Cooper 2010:183).11 For the imminent future of the world, climate
change is not just a minor threat. Environmentally induced interstate conflicts or societal breakdown must be expected (CNA, 2007). The German
Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU, 2008:1) notes that climate change ‘‘will draw ever-deeper lines of division and conflict in international
relations, triggering numerous conflicts between and within countries.’’ The latest forecast by the National Intelligence Council (2008) ranks climate
change, with reference to its severe results such as water and resource scarcity, next to international terrorism, while the notoriously skeptic Bush
Administration acknowledged the ‘‘significant relevance’’ of climate change for national security in the Arctic region. The new NATO strategy, as well as
the 2010 US National Security Strategy, mentions climate as a threat almost identical to the German government and European Commission’s emphasis
on climate security (Reiber and Zelli 2011). Another
example of the connection between climate and national
security can be seen in the Arctic. The rise in regional temperature is as much as twice the global average, rendering the very
landscape a matter of concern. The sea ice over the North Pole might vanish completely within the next 30 years, shortening the sea-lanes between
Europe and Asia by up to 4,000 nautical miles. The ongoing retraction destabilizes the existing sovereignty practices such as borders, navigation,
defense, and extractive policies. It forces ‘‘the state system to confront its accepted suppositions about the relationship among land, state, territory,
and nation’’ (Gerhardt, Steinberg, Tasch, Fabiano, and Shields 2010:999). In response, the
Canadian government is rapidly
extending its military presence at the American continent’s northern rim in order to control its
exposed territorial demarcations and the Northwest Passage (Byers 2009). On the opposite side of the Arctic, Russia’s
government is trying to secure territorial claims and the interests of its national oil companies by re-establishing its strategic
‘‘bear bombers’’ patrol flights and large-scale military drills (Zysk 2010). ‘‘The bear,’’ Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has declared, ‘‘is the real
master of the Arctic,’’ thus emphasizing both Russia’s ‘‘profound strategic interests’’ in the region, as well as the dire consequences of ice shield
reduction and sea ice melting for the animal’s living conditions (Harding 2010). In this strategic rivalry, the point of view of indigenous groups—not to
mention of flora and fauna—is marginalized, despite the fact that their livelihood is existentially threatened (Leichenko and O’Brien 2008:91–103;
Adger, Barnett, Chapin, and Ellemor 2011:9–13).12 Despite their conflicting strategic interests, the governments of Denmark, Russia, and Canada
agreed to solve their territorial disputes within international legal frameworks. By 2013, the UN seabed commission will determine ownership rights.
Here, scientific practices once again come into play, since geologists and 10This conclusion is based on a systematic reading of over 30 reports, policy
papers, and magazine articles that were published in Australia, Northern America, and Europe. For further discussions, see Maas and Ta¨nzler (2009)
and Brzoska (2009). 11The military’s interest in climate dates back to the World War II and even before, while climate science and the
US military have a history of being strongly interwoven (Weart 2003). 12Due to its focus on large-scale system
components, the research on ‘‘tipping points’’ usually omits a smallscale, human perspective (Liverman 2009). It thus cannot offer sufficient spatial
resolution that would allow for meaningful adaptation policies. Maximilian Mayer 173 lawyers map the region’s continental shelves and shall ascertain
which nations own exclusive rights to exploit the large gas and oil deposits under International Law (Mayer and Schouten 2011:25). In sum, the rapid
‘‘opening up’’ of the North leads to the evolution of overlapping assemblages, in which the same materials are often enrolled differently, but rapid
physical, ecological, and territorial changes are mainly translated into threats to sovereignty and economic interests. The associations that enact state
interests are so dominant because they entail multiple practices in a coherent and geographically dispersed way, and easily connect with the existing
global assemblages such as transport shipping and fossil resource extraction.
The West is complicit and fuels warming in the Middle East and Asia until
warming threatens Western Cities – warming is no longer a “luxury cause”, but
rather an immediate threat, but only when threatening Western Cities
Klein 16, Naomi Klein is the author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, as
well as The Shock Doctrine and No Logo. She delivered the 2016 Edward W. Said London
Lecture, from which this essay is adapted. (Let Them Drown The Violence of Othering in a
Warming World) London Review of Books Vol. 38 No. 11 · 2 June 2016 pages 11-14 )
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n11/naomi-klein/let-them-drown jl
Edward Said was no tree-hugger. Descended from traders, artisans and professionals, he once described himself as ‘an
extreme case of an urban Palestinian whose relationship to the land is basically metaphorical’. In After the Last Sky, his meditation
on the photographs of Jean Mohr, he explored the most intimate aspects of Palestinian lives, from hospitality to sports to home
décor. The tiniest detail – the placing of a picture frame, the defiant posture of a child – provoked a torrent of insight from Said. Yet
when confronted with images of Palestinian farmers – tending their flocks, working the fields –
the specificity suddenly evaporated. Which crops were being cultivated? What was the state of the soil?
The availability of water? Nothing was forthcoming. ‘I continue to perceive a population of poor, suffering,
occasionally colourful peasants, unchanging and collective,’ Said confessed. This perception was ‘mythic’, he acknowledged – yet it
remained. If farming was another world for Said, those who devoted their lives to matters like air and water pollution appear to have
inhabited another planet. Speaking to his colleague Rob Nixon,
he once described environmentalism as ‘the
indulgence of spoiled tree-huggers who lack a proper cause’. But the environmental
challenges of the Middle East are impossible to ignore for anyone immersed, as Said was, in its
geopolitics. This is a region intensely vulnerable to heat and water stress, to sea-level rise and
to desertification. A recent paper in Nature Climate Change predicts that, unless we radically lower emissions
and lower them fast, large parts of the Middle East will likely ‘experience temperature levels
that are intolerable to humans’ by the end of this century. And that’s about as blunt as climate scientists get.
Yet environmental issues in the region still tend to be treated as afterthoughts, or luxury
causes. The reason is not ignorance, or indifference. It’s just bandwidth. Climate change is a grave threat but
the most frightening impacts are in the medium term. And in the short term, there are always far
more pressing threats to contend with: military occupation, air assault, systemic discrimination,
embargo. Nothing can compete with that – nor should it attempt to try.
Links – Kritikal Affs
Anarchy leads to violence against Asians, exemplified in the 1992 LA Riots in
which Asian American Immigrants, especially Korean Americans, faced excess
violence only to have their tragedies glossed over and erased
culturalweekly.com 12, https://www.culturalweekly.com/korean-american-identity-la-
riots/ jl
The Los Angeles riots, the largest urban race riot in United States history, resulted in 55 deaths and over $1
billion in property damages, close to one half of which ($ 400 million) was suffered by over 2,000
Korean American shop owners in South Central Los Angeles and Koreatown. The riots, which erupted on
April 29, 2012 following the acquittal of the four police officers charged in the beating of Rodney King, had immobilized the city for
four days and three nights. The anarchy that ensued during those days was put down after both the
National Guard and the Federal Troops were deployed throughout the city. It was the darkest
hour in Los Angeles history and the complete breakdown of social order was broadcast live via satellite
television screens around the world. When the Los Angeles Police Department made the decision to retreat
from the riots’ flashpoint of Florence and Normandy, the emboldened street gangs took
advantage of the chaos by looting and burning the Korean owned stores in South Central L os
Angeles. Many shop owners, who had not been able to flee South Central when the violence
erupted, were stranded in the stores. “We frantically called the police but nobody picked up.
When they did they simply told us that there was nothing they could do about it,” recalls one of the
victims. While the Los Angeles media was busy reporting the burning and looting of the stores, the Korean American media,
particularly Radio Korea, which had switched to an emergency broadcast, were reporting about the family members who were still
stranded. The next day, the street gangs targeted the neighboring Koreatown, approximately 2 miles north of South Los Angeles. As
the police, which had retreated from South Central the day before, began urging the Korean American shop owners in Koreatown to
evacuate Koreatown because they had no intention of protecting it, Korean American shop owners armed themselves to protect the
businesses from the looters. “Had they not done so,” recalls Professor Leo Estrada of UCLA in the film, “the entire town would have
burned down like South Central the day before.” Estrada was a member of the Christopher Commission who at the time chose to
drive through Koreatown in a patrol car made available to the commission members. “The police car was driving through Koreatown
60 miles per hour without stopping for traffic lights. [The police] were afraid.” One of the gang members later recalled in an
interview with a Korean American television that they had been angered by the local television’s repeated playing of a Korean grocer
Soon Ja Du coldly shooting Latasha Harlins in the back of the head. He said he had no idea that there was a fist fight which preceded
the shooting because that had been edited out. “Racial polarization is part of the fabric of this country,” said Ed Boyer, former Los
Angeles Times Editor, who appears in the film. “[Korean
Americans] paid with the losses of their businesses,
with indignity and humiliation and that’s something that’s never really been put right.” “It’s
an apology that has never been made,” says Professor Mike Davis of UC Riverside who also appears in the film. It is
little known that 100,000 Korean Americans from all over Southern California converged in
Koreatown three days after the riots to express their outrage and participate in a peace march
that allowed Korean Americans to reclaim the town from the looters . Our film shows the heretofore
unseen footage in the film. “This [was] a tremendous event for Korean Americans and probably one of the defining moments for
Korean American identity, because here was a group of people who [were] unfairly targeted and our response was not down with
African American or down with America. It was we want peace, we are here to live in harmony with our neighbors,” says Dr. Helen
Kim who also is interviewed in the film. She was a medical student from Tufts University who had come out to participate in the
march after her parents’ store was looted by the mobs. Clash of Colors draws on in-depth interviews from a balanced expert panel
including Bill Boyarsky, former Los Angeles Times columnist, K W Lee, former Editor of Korea Times, radio personality Larry Elder,
Councilman Tom LaBonge, former council members Mike Hernandez and Mike Woo, UCLA professors Ivan Light, Darnell Hunt and
Leo Estrada, AME Church’s Rev. Cecil Murray, and more. Clash of Colors also details unsung stories such as how Radio Korea became
a lifeline of communication for Korean Americans when they were left to fend for themselves. After the riots, the film explains, the
politically powerless Korean immigrant community had to endure another act of discrimination carried out, this time, by the city’s
elected officials when the Los Angeles City Council, in the name of public safety, violated Korean American’s constitutionally
protected property rights by enacting ordinances which made it economically unfeasible to rebuild in South Central. In short, the
film exposes for the first time how Koreatown endured this tumultuous period, and how the event became a turning point for
Korean Americans. In conjunction with Clash of Colors, I also created a documentary short, Koreatown, 20 Years After the LA Riots,
which has also just had its debut. Koreatown, 20 Years After examines the political advances achieved by the Korean American
community, twenty years later, in its highly visible public participation in the redistricting process, thereby emerging as a new
political voice in the city. The short illuminates the controversial redistricting process in which Korean American community’s
repeated pleas in the public hearings, in which Korean Americans, both young and old, showed up in large numbers, were
completely ignored by the City Council. Contrary to their wishes to be moved in whole to Councilman Eric Garcetti’s 13th district, a
district that contains Thai Town and Historic Filipinotown, which would have given the community a better opportunity to elect a
council representative of its own, the new map annexed most of Koreatown’s lucrative business core into City Council President
Herb Wesson’s 10th district, which ensured that Koreatown will remain a captive minority within that district with no chances of
electing a representative responsive to the needs and wishes of the Korean American community. The short documents how, 20
years later, the newly awakened Korean American community is prepared to assume leadership role in challenging the system that is
not responsive to the needs and wishes of the citizens of Los Angeles.
Anti-blackness
The black-white binary doesn’t go far enough – the 1AC’s narrative of blackness
versus whiteness is oversimplified and does not capture the plight of other
minorities, such as Asian Americans – turns the K
Ng et al 7 (JENNIFER C. NG, assistant professor at the University of Kansas, “Chapter 4
Contesting the Model Minority and Perpetual Foreigner Stereotypes: A Critical Review of
Literature on Asian Americans in Education”, 2007
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.3102/0091732X07300046095#, DOA: 6/27/17)//AK
**edited for ableist language
An understanding of how racial meanings have been constructed about Asian Americans, or
how they have been racialized (Omi & Winant, 1994), requires a departure from a
Black/White racial binary. Legal scholar Ancheta (2000) considers how anti-Asian discrimination is
distinctly different from anti-Black subordination. He writes, “The racialization of Asian Americans has taken on
two primary forms: racialization as non-Americans and racialization as the model minority” (p. 44). This outsider racialization
constructs Asian Americans as foreign-born outsiders. In
the realm of education, this construction extends to
the view [belief] of Asian Americans as “forever foreigners” (Tuan, 1998), where the
permanency of equal status as citizens cannot be fully realized. Asian American racialization as
both the model minority and the foreigner exists within larger racial discourses. C. Kim (1999)
posits a theory of “a field of racial positions” that considers how Asian Americans have been
racialized relative to Whites and Blacks and how racialization is more complex than a hierarchy
with Whites on top, Blacks on the bottom, and other groups in between (p. 106). Kim’s field of racial
positions involves at least two axes (superior/inferior and insider/foreigner), which acknowledges the different ways that groups are
racialized. Asian Americans are “racially triangulated” vis-à-vis Whites and Blacks through two
interrelated processes of “relative valorization” (Whites valorizing Asian Americans relative to
Blacks) and the process of “civic ostracism” (Whites constructing Asian Americans as foreign
and Other, p. 107). The model minority and foreigner images emerge in research on Asian
Americans in K–12 schooling (Lei, 1998) and higher education (S. S. Lee, 2006; Suzuki, 2002). Both Lei and S.
S. Lee discuss how these representations play off each other and are interconnected, placing Asian Americans in a
vulnerable racial position, ostracized from both the White majority and causing racial tensions
with other minorities (primarily African Americans). Placed within the confines of the Black/White
discourse, Asian Americans have been inexactly situated in comparison to Whites and Blacks
rather than understood as racialized in distinct ways. The representations of Asian American
students as models and foreigners also uphold the racial status quo, which marginalizes
students of color (Jo, 2004; S. J. Lee, 2006; Lei, 1998). Although researchers have uncovered the more complex ways that
Asian Americans are racialized, Asian Americans continue to be cast as interlopers in a Black/White
racial discourse; being neither Black nor White, Asian Americans rarely gain visibility and voice
as racial minorities. Scholars in the fields of history (Takaki, 1998), English (Lowe, 2000), anthropology (Manalansan, 2000,
2003), sociology (Kibria, 2002; C. Kim, 1999; Min, 1996; Tuan, 1998), ethnic and gender studies (Espiritu, 1997; R. Lee, 1999), and law
(Ancheta, 2000; Wu, 1995) have critically examined the complexities of Asian American experiences and challenged the ways that
the public has falsely imagined them. The field of education, however, has lagged behind these theoretical advances.
There is great foundational knowledge to be gleaned from other disciplines in addressing the educational concerns and needs of
Asian American students. The specter of Asians and Asian Americans as the yellow peril and the model minority has a long history.
First invoked during the 19th century to create comparative labor advantage between and among the railroad barons to yield high
profit through the cheapest labor force, Chinese workers were typically fashioned as the model against which other immigrant
groups, such as the Irish, should aspire (Takaki, 1998; Wu, 1995). When the Chinese Exclusion law of 1882—stemming from the fear
of the “Yellow Peril,” as popularized by novelist Jack London—curtailed further migration of Chinese, attention started to shift to the
growing population of Japanese immigrants along the West Coast (Daniels, 1988). Again, although seemingly admired for their
ability to cultivate difficult arid lands, they were then shunned and despised for their success in agriculture. At the outbreak of World
War II, Japanese immigrants and Americans were incarcerated for fear of disloyalty and espionage. In
the 1960s, during the
Civil Rights movement, the image of Asian Americans seemed to improve, in relation to
African Americans and other racial minority groups who sought equal rights and protection
under the law; at this time, newspaper headlines hailed Chinese and Japanese Americans as
the model minority. Popular magazines such as Time and Newsweek highlighted their Confucian-style “rugged
individualism”; Asians did not need government support to make it in U.S. society. As numerous Asian Americanists have noted
throughout the years (Cheng & Yang, 2000; Osajima, 2000), the
purposeful ways in which Asians were heralded
for their success was a direct attack against African Americans in their outspoken quest for
equality in the 1960s and against a critique of institutional and structural racism. Such
pernicious and unfounded comparisons between the races only served to create fissures that
continue to exist today and support a message of individual effort as a primary means to
overcome racism, erasing the existence of structural barriers. Contemporary characterizations of Asian
Americans reveal the persistence of the foreigner and model minority stereotypes in mainstream culture and more educated,
professional communities. In 2002, for example, the popular young adult clothing company Abercrombie & Fitch launched a line of
T-shirts intended to add humor and levity to its fashion that featured slant-eyed, Asian characters pulling rickshaws and working in
laundromats (Gliona & Goldman, 2002). Notions of Asian American foreignness also are evident in educational discussions. In his
1999 Phi Delta Kappan essay titled “The Demise of the Asian Math Gene,” for example, Gerald Bracey speculated on the role of
Confucian ideals behind Asian American educational success as well as the impact of poorer, rural, and less literate homeland factors
resulting in Asian American juvenile delinquency. Even more recently, Bracey (2005) wrote about the “spelling gene” that children of
Indian ancestry must possess, helping them win five of the last seven Scripps National Spelling Bees. Bracey (citing Joseph Berger
from The New York Times) explained that preparing for spelling bees is especially compatible with the “rote learning methods of
their homeland” where people “do not regard champion spellers as nerds” (p. 92). However, concluding that Indian parents may be
even more single-minded than American parents who want their children to succeed in extracurricular endeavors, Bracey stated, “I
couldn’t help thinking of those years of mono-maniacally obsessive preparation as a form of child abuse” (p. 92). These
representations reinforce ideas that Asian Americans are culturally (and even genetically) distinct from the rest of America and that
their narrow focus on achievement is not completely praiseworthy. Theories about Asian “Otherness” can be applied to educational
discussions. Cultural theorist Said’s (1978) influential work on the theory of Orientalism also provides ample thought for how the
Occident has imagined the place of the Orient as a means for dominance and control, including the means of representation as
reified into the daily structures of institutions such as education. Indeed, the power of the Western gaze to focus on its cultural
superiority over others has led to the continued belief and resultant policies maintaining the status quo. As Rizvi and Lingard (2006)
write, Orientalism is best understood as a system of representations, a discourse framed by political forces through which the West
sought to understand and control its colonized populations. It is a discourse that both assumes and promotes a fundamental
difference between the Western “us” and Oriental “them.” It is a manner of regularized interpreting, writing about and accounting
for the Orient, dominated by imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases politically marshaled to self-justify imperial conquests
and exploitation. In this sense, the Orient is an imagined place that is articulated through as an entire system of thought and
scholarship. (p. 296) As Rizvi and Lingard (2006) note, the influence of Said to education and educational policies comes from one’s
perceived notions of how the Other lives. In this example, and through our years of teaching experiences, we find that a number of
educators still come to the classroom with a priori assumptions about the profound foreignness of their Asian American students. It
is that sense of profound cultural difference that underlies the model minority stereotype as well. One dangerous strain in
educational research that perpetuates the construction of Asian Americans as profoundly different relates to explanations for their
academic success. All too often, cultural explanations are offered. For example, our initial perusal of research related to Asian
American students revealed a troubling tendency to rely on particular cultural characteristics, such as the Confucian norms, to
primarily account for the academic achievement of Asian Americans (Pearce, 2006; Zhou, 2000). The tenor of these conclusions
presumes Asian American educational achievement, when in fact these studies do not acknowledge Asian Americans’ bimodal
performance, which includes students performing below the norm (Hune & Chan, 1997). Pang, Kiang, and Pak (2004) have indicated
the great diversity of ethnicities that constitute Asian Pacific Americans (APA) and assert that creating monolithic truths based on
two or three high-achieving ethnicities does a disservice to everyone. Yet the continued emphasis on educational research that
presumes and highlights the academic achievement of Asian Americans creates a wedge between other racial minority groups.
Coupled with this, Asian American success discourse is a presumption of African American and Latino academic underachievement.
Critical historians (Anderson, 1998, 2004a, 2004b; Span & Anderson, 2005; Williams, 2005) have provided ample evidence for the
persistence of educational attainment by African Americans since the time of slavery to counter current misconceptions and cultural
deficit models in which African Americans do not value education. Yet the implicit and sometimes explicit academic comparisons between the high-
This binary erases the
achieving Asians with the low-achieving African Americans persists and only serves to maintain White privilege.
experiences of Asian Americans who do not achieve and also the experiences of African
Americans, Latinas/Latinos, and Native Americans who do achieve. As aptly phrased by S. J.
Lee (1996), the model minority stereotype is a hegemonic device to desensitize the public
about the deep and troubling history of race relations in the United States; schools and
educators become implicated in the process.
Baudrillard - Simulation
Baudrillard’s analysis of simulation is Orientalist – creates hierarchal structure
that reproduces endless violence
Almond 7 (Ian, literary scholar and writer, Professor of World Literature at Georgetown
University, Published in 2007 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd, “THE NEW ORIENTALISTS: Postmodern
representations of Islam from Foucault to Baudrillard”) RR Jr
The passage is remarkable for a number of points. First of all,
we in the West are hampered by truth. Here
Baudrillard, bringing in both Nietzsche and Derrida, seems to link the history of mimesis, of
truth and representation, in the West with a certain naïveté. This naïveté, it seems, is ultimately logocentric
– the delusion of correspondence theory, still nurtured by modernity, that an image must necessarily correspond to ‘something’ on
the other side of it. Arabs (and, oddly enough, Romanians – not for the first time does the Islamic East and the Soviet/Orthodox
East become united in common opposition to Protestant capitalism ) possess a cynicism which enables them to
see truth as purely functional, rather than representational. Of course, the unpleasant
implication of the passage is that lies are second-nature to the Arab mind – unhampered 170 |
Islam, ‘theory’ and Europe by the burden of sincerity, enlightened as to the real nature of
‘unconditional simulacra’, the irrelevance of the signifier to the signified, the Arab sees no
distinction between truth and lies, between fact and fiction, between the genuine and the
fake. Although this idea is reminiscent of a common Western conviction of nihilism in the
Oriental mind – the secret maxim of Nietzsche’s Assassins (‘Nothing is true. Everything is Allowed’) – Baudrillard provides a
surprisingly original justification for this cliché by an appeal to the iconoclast/Islamic prohibition of the
image, a historical reference he has already made use of elsewhere (see Baudrillard’s belief that the
Iconoclast’s ‘rage to destroy images arose precisely because they sensed this omnipotence of simulacra’).14 Because Muslims
and iconoclasts already believe images to be haram or unclean, they have no moral reservations
about misusing them in order to obtain what they desire . Hence the West’s naïveté which rises from its
idolatry of the image, its over-sanctification of a non-existent truth, its deluded belief in the image’s divine referent.
Baudrillard’s Arabs, the passage suggests, manipulate images with greater dexterity than their
Western counterparts because they know them to be nothing more than idols, false gods,
empty signs. For all its Islamic stereotypes and Oriental clichés, the most positive gesture towards Islam in Baudrillard’s text lies
in his straightforward recognition of the ‘Enlightenment Fundamentalist’ (p. 80), an acknowledgement which, while omitting to
exempt Islam from the charge of fundamentalism, sees standard ‘rational’ objections to it as groundless, dogmatic and equally
dangerous: ‘We do not practise hard, fundamentalist traditionalism, we practise soft, subtle and shameful democratic traditionalism
by consensus. However, consensual traditionalism (that of the Enlightenment, the Rights of Man, the Left in power,
the repentant intellectual and sentimental humanism) is
every bit as fierce as that of any tribal religion or
primitive society’ (p. 79). If Islam is an honest, open, unashamed fundamentalism, the beliefs
one could almost redefine here as ‘Western traditionalism’ are more hypocritical, forever
pretending to be something they are not, forever claiming their opposites (superstition,
religion, tribalism) to be radically different from themselves. This denial of the
Enlightenment’s universal exclusiveness and moral/ontological superiority over the
superstitions and tribalisms it tries to denounce is a gesture we have seen in all the thinkers
examined in this book – an unconscious sympathy with Islam as an unjustly defamed
primitivism, an impatience with modernity’s self-denial and 200-year-old ignorance of what it
really is.
Deleuzeian Nomads
Your concept of nomads fetishizes non-western knowledge forms and assumes

everyone has equal opportunities
Sutherland 14
Thomas, “School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne” Environment
and Planning D: Society and Space 2014, volume 32, pages 935– 950//li cao. gw
It is worth acknowledging that the concept of nomadism has already been rigorously critiqued from many distinct perspectives.
Norris (1993, page 231), for instance, whose work seeks principally to rescue poststructuralist theory from the epistemological
skepticism that is so often ascribed to it, contends that Kant has already anticipated the metaphor of the nomad as it is deployed in
Deleuze’s philosophy, and uses it to argue for “ a process of enlightened reciprocal exchange which abjures the presumptive
(authoritarian) appeal to self-evident grounds, but which maintains the possibility of arriving at adequate criteria or validity-
conditions for arguments offered in the public sphere of accountable reasons and principles.” Janet Wolff (1993, page 235)
criticizes nomadism from a feminist perspective , observing not only that the postmodernist celebration of the
death of the grand metanarrative potentially undermines the very premise of feminism itself , but that “the
consequent suggestion of free and equal mobility is itself a deception, since we don’t all have
the same access to the road”, with the result that “in a patriarchal culture we are not all, as cultural critics any more than
social beings, ‘on the road’ together”. Although she acknowledges the potentially emancipatory value of the vocabulary of mobility,
Wolff (page 235) advises caution, for it “also encourages the irresponsibility of flight and misleadingly
implies a notion of universal and equal mobility”, eliding “the exclusions of a metaphoric
discourse of travel”. Likewise, Caren Kaplan (1996, pages 89)—observing that, according to Deleuze and Guattari’s own
account, the movement of deterritorialization is always accompanied by a reterritorialization— argues that such discourse
“itself cannot escape colonial discourse”, for deterritorialization “colonizes, appropriates, even raids other spaces”.
Declaring that “Euro-American recourse to the metaphors of desert and nomad can never be
innocent or separable from the dominant orientalist tropes in circulation throughout
modernity”, Kaplan (1996, pages 66, 90) observes the “close fit between the mythologized elements of migration
(independence, alternative organization to nation-states, lack of opportunity to accumulate much surplus, etc) and EuroAmerican
modernist privileging of solitude and the celebration of the specific locations associated with
nomads.” “As a metaphor”, Cresswell (2006, page 54) argues, “the nomad repeats centuries of Western
romanticization of the non-Western other. It simultaneously reproduces representational strategies of colonialism
under the guise of the nonrepresentational.” The fetishization of the nomadic identity is concerning , firstly
because one might surmise that the true nomads of our age—refugees, displaced peoples, and the mobile working poor
—would in most cases desire nothing more than the security of a somewhat fixed, static identity, and at present have little ability to
take advantage of the multiplicitous interconnectivity of which Braidotti speaks. Such accounts, remarks Clemens (2003, page 174),
“oscillate undecidably between considering such ‘movement’ as a theoretico-political category (registering a dire situation of, say,
migrant displacement) and enthusiastically affirming it as a utopian figure”. Likewise, argues Slavoj Žižek (2006, page 390), “ the
problem with ‘abstract’ universal terms like hybridity and nomadic subjectivity is that they tend to iron out, to render invisible, the
antagonism that cuts across their content: when hybridity covers the globetrotting academic as well as the refugee from a war-torn
country, it does something similar to obfuscating the gap that separates starving from dieting.” There is something terribly
cosmopolitan about the figure of the Deleuzian nomad, and this remains patently clear within Braidotti’s work. Mobility can certainly
be an enormously liberating capacity, but there is significant risk in idealizing it as a political and ethical imperative in a society
where mobility is often something that is imposed rather than chosen , and the principles of
flexibility and adaptability are codewords for the increasing precariousness of labour.
Your theory of nomadic people comes from a position of whiteness and ignores
the colonial past the theory grows froms
Cresswell 06, Tim, Cresswell, Tim. On the move : mobility in the modern Western world / by
Tim Cresswell. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-415-95255-2
(hardback) ISBN-13: 978-0-415-95256-9 (pbk. ) 1. Movement (Philosophy) I. Title. B105.M65C74
2006 304.801--dc22, (Tim Cresswell is Dean of the Faculty and Vice President for Academic
Affairs at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut.) li cao. gw
The figure of the nomad has been central to both the metaphysics of sedentarism and, clearly, the nomadic metaphysics we are
exploring here. Th e postmodern nomad, though, is a remarkably unsocial being—unmarked by the traces of class, gender, ethnicity,
sexuality, and geography. They are nomads who appear as entries on a census table, or dots on a map—abstract, dehistoricized, and
undifferentiated—a mobile mass. A recent, distinctly postmodern, book on design in New York, subtitled “Nomadic Design,” aptly
illustrates the vacuous generalizations to which the nomad has been subjected.99 In the introduction to the pages of glossy
photographs, the editors make the argument that New York is a nomadic city where the nomadic world of the horizontal contests
the vertical skyscraper world of power and money. They suggest that in New York “everything crosses over.” Th e pictures that make
up the majority of the text focus on the design of New York, juxtaposing the work of guerrilla artist, urban graffiti campaigns, and
antihomeless activism on the one hand, with the designer spaces of the Investment Banking Partnership, the Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen
and Hamilton Law Offices, and the offices of Island Records. All are linked (in the editors’ eyes) by their expression of nomadic
desire. Th ebook is a beautiful book that makes even homelessness appear to be aesthetically seductive. Yet to place the protests of
the homeless next to the lush million dollar interiors of New York’s hyperprivileged eradicates the differences between them
through a philosophical and aesthetic deceit that singularly fails to point out the other, less pleasing, connections between huge
private spaces of the wealthy and the colorful protests of the homeless. Here, as with other mobilizations of the nomad metaphor in
recent times, little attention is paid to the historical conditions that produce specific forms of movement, which are radically
different. Janet Wolff has gone some way to contextualizing the moving subjects of postmodern discourse. She describes how these
metaphors are gendered in a way that is usually unacknowledged. Her argument is that the actual practices of travel,
which serve to exclude women, are reflected in the androcentric tendencies of theoretical mobility.
[T]he problems with terms like “nomad”, “maps” and “travel” is that they are not usually located, and hence (and purposely) they
suggest ungrounded and unbounded movement—since the whole point is to resist selves/viewers/subjects. But the
consequent suggestion of free and equal mobility is itself a deception, since we don’t all have
the same access to the road.100 The nomad figure is also “raced” in ways that are often elided . As
a metaphor, the nomad repeats centuries of Western romanticization of the non Western other.
It simultaneously reproduces representational strategies of colonialism under the guise of the
nonrepresentational. This strategy “allows the critic to stand outside the suspect domains of
manipulation and representation; it confers a kind of immunity . . .”101 Further, it allows Deleuze
and Guattari to duck the “ethical burden of representing real, actual nomads who might
eventually have something to say in response.”102 Nomads, as such, do not have a voice in the
text nor do nonWestern anthropologists. Th e view they construct is entirely Eurocentric,
based on extremely dubious colonial accounts of nomads in Africa and elsewhere . If Deleuze and
Guattari’s nomad thought is in fact “arborescent,” if it is rooted in and following the practices of, for example, a
violently representational, colonial ethnography , while at the same time claiming to be
anticolonial, antianthropological, and nonrepresentational, then it might have to be considered one of those
“pseudomultiplicities” that the authors abhor.103 Insofar as nomadology looks to the representations of colonial anthropology for
its conception of the nomad, it is a thoroughly Orientalist discourse investing the non-Western and, in
this case, nonsedentary population with desire and romance . So, in addition to the critique that nomadic
metaphysics is overly abstract and universalizing in its allocation of meaning to mobility, its advocates oft en overlook
the colonial power relations that produced such images in the fi rst place. Indeed, the use of
the nomad is oft en nothing more than a form of imaginative neocolonialism .104
Edleman
Edelman conflates the symbolic and the Real to create a fantasy child Other and
gets coopted by capitalism – only recapturing and redeploying the
emancipatory desire towards the future that he negates can create a truly
revolutionary queer politics of affirmation
Cornell & Seely 14 (Drucilla Cornell, Professor of Political Science, Women's Studies, and Comparative Literature @
Rutgers University, & Stephen D. Seely, Ph.D. student in Women’s and Gender Studies @ Rutgers University, B.A. w/ Highest
Distinction in Gender and Women’s Studies & Psychology from University of Illinois, “There’s Nothing Revolutionary about a
Blowjob”, Social Text 119, Vol. 32, No. 2, Summer 2014, http://socialtext.dukejournals.org/content/32/2_119/1.full.pdf)
Before we turn to Foucault’s work, we feel that in
order to suggest a return of queer theory to revolutionary
possibility, we must first grapple with Lee Edelman’s forceful assertion that the commitment to
futurity that must necessarily underwrite any form of revolutionary politics is always already
both conservative and heteronormative. As Edelman writes: For politics, however radical the means by which some
of its practitioners seek to effect a more desirable social order, remains, at its core, conservative insofar as it works to affirm a
structure, to authenticate social order, which it then intends to transmit to the future in the form of its inner Child. That Child
remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention. . . . What,
in that case, would it signify not to be “fighting for the children”? How could one take the other “side,” when taking any side at all
necessarily constrains one to take the side of, by virtue of taking a side within, a political order that returns to the Child as the image
of the future it intends? 4 Edelman’s refusal of politics postulates what he takes to be the radical
negativity of jouissance as an “unnamable remainder,” which when harnessed through an
identification with the death drive, whatever that means, can actually unravel the social. The
problem, if we can be a little technical here, is the unpsychoanalytic way in which Edelman mobilizes
Lacanian concepts. 6 5 As practicing Lacanian analyst Judith Feher Guerwich points out, “Jouissance is a legal term — in
Latin usufructus — referring to the right to enjoy the use of a thing as opposed to owning it.” Thus, jouissance is not a
disruptive remainder ; it is instead “the subject’s experience of being for the Other as an
object of enjoyment, of use or abuse, in contrast to being the object of the Other’s desire.”
What happens when one is captured by the jouissance of the Other is that the Other becomes
a frightening mystery, so that the subject is constantly caught in an unanswerable question:
What does the Other want from me? The jouissance of the Other then has the special quality of being both real and
mythical. The subject attributes qualities to the Other that do not really exist (indeed Lacan goes so
far as to argue that the “big” Other does not exist) precisely because the subject remains clueless
about who, or even what, this Other actually is. One of the goals of Lacanian psychoanalysis is thus to demystify
the Other, and as such, the Oedipal fantasy needs to be exposed as fantasy. When Lacan writes that “the unconscious is the
discourse of the Other,” he means that our desires and fantasies come to us from the place of the Other rather than our own
conscious ego. These unconscious fantasies, particularly the Oedipal myth, are developed in order to fend off our fear of being
encompassed by the jouissance of our primary Other(s) (especially the mother) who leave us helpless before the ultimate question:
what does the Other want of us? This fear becomes a wish, including a wish for a law that could keep us from being obliterated by or
collapsed into the jouissance of the Other. And this is why, as Feher Guerwich argues, the Oedipal myth in Lacan is an effect rather
than a cause of subjectivity. In Freud, acceptance of the threat of castration is what allows the boy to renounce his primary Oedipal
desires for the (m)Other and is thus a cause of subjectivity. For Lacan, however, castration names the recognition of the
incompleteness of the Other, which is precisely what allows the subject to escape from capture by the Other’s jouissance. Yet , in
order to defend against this traumatic recognition, the subject develops the myth of the paternal law that enables the subject to
believe that he could fulfill the (m)Other if only it weren’t prohibited. As Lacan puts it, “Castration means that jouissance has to be
refused in order to be attained on the inverse scale of the Law of desire.” 10 11 Because no one’s fantasy is
completely correlated with that of another subject, no one can ever be completely reduced
to someone else’s object of use (jouissance). Our uniqueness resides in our fantasy life, so
from that point of view, our subjectivity is never completely extinguished even in madness. For Lacan,
the subject of desire is the subject of the unconscious in a unique sense. Through Lacanian analysis we lose the fantasy of being
completely plugged into the Other, but through that loss we gain awareness of ourselves of having our own psychic life. On the
other side, however, is psychic death, or the wish to extinguish the subjectivity that is born with our desire and remain instead an
object for the Other. The
ethical goal is thus to reach the point where the patient can see that
jouissance is actually within us and not an allpowerful entity who can obliterate us. The fantasy
that we are subjected to the Other is a difficult one to release precisely because the unconscious needs to fend off capture by the
jouissance of the Other. Paradoxically, we need the fantasy of the symbolic law to feel safe from
being consumed by the Other insofar as this Law purports to prohibit certain threatening
desires. Rightwing women, for example, develop an unconscious wish for a law that can protect them from the jouissance of the
Other, which they identify with the fantasy figure of the homosexual. Thus, antigay politics can be seen as a defensive reaction
formation in the classic sense: the jouissance of the Other is outlawed by outlawing gay and lesbian marriage, and therefore the
subject is safe. It
is this unrealizable unconscious wish that Edelman interprets as a “a tear in the
social fabric.” But an unrealizable wish is not “an impossible Real,” as Edelman seems to
think. To quote Edelman himself on this misunderstanding in his attempt to salvage jouissance for the
acting out of impossible queerness: 12 But to the extent that jouissance as a tear in the social fabric of symbolic reality
as we know it unravels the solidity of every object, including the object as which the subject necessarily takes itself, it evokes the
death drive that always insists on the void both in and of the subject beyond its fantasy of selfrealization in the domain of the
pleasure principle. 13 He then goes on to claim that queerness “marks . . . the place of a jouissance
from which [the symbolic] can never escape.” For Edelman, then, queerness is a kind of
radically negative and unnamable Real, a site of disruptive jouissance, the death drive within
the social order. Here, Edelman concedes to capture in the jouissance of the Other by clinging to
the symbolic law that purportedly prohibits queerness , which can therefore only reappear as a self and
socially destructive tear from within. Edelman, in other words, takes the fantasy of the symbolic law as
reality, appearing to forget that for Lacan “the Other doesn’t exist.” As we have pointed out, the all
encompassing Other (or symbolic) who has the power to completely determine the subject is
ultimately only a fantasy , which is why Lacan frequently refers to it as the “barred Other.” 14 There is no
“beyond accommodation” to a selfencircled symbolic order , as it is described in Edelman’s
work. 15 He is the subject who knows what is impossible as opposed to the subject that is
constituted through the disruption of a Real that is unknowable but that affects us by
throwing time out of joint, as Jacques Derrida reminds us again and again. The beyond of the Real that disjoins
temporality or the narrative of historicism is precisely what keeps the future open as a promise of the indetermination that itself
disrupts the selfenclosure of the symbolic order. We need to underscore this point: the Real is not something. The
Real is not “there.” It is, instead, precisely only thinkable as that which disrupts the
selfenclosure of the symbolic order, but that is not to say that the Real is nothing. Instead, the Real is what
remains as “it” effects the disruption of the selfenclosure of the symbolic. It is there only in its
effects, one of which Derrida emphasizes in Specters of Marx as the disjoining of time that keeps
open the future. Indeed, Edelman’s mistake is to frame the real as “impossible,” because the
very notion of the impossible is a symbolic one and the Real remains forever other to the
symbolic . In other words, if the Real is beyond the knowable then we can never know what is impossible. The future is a
promise and not a narrative precisely because the other remains other to all historical
attempts to capture what is beyond. To quote Derrida: It was then a matter of thinking another
historicity — not a new history and still less a “new historicism,” but another opening of eventness as
historicity that permitted one not to renounce, but on the contrary to open up access to an
affirmative thinking of the messianic and emancipatory promise as promise: as promise and
not as onto-theological or teleo-eschatological program or design. Not only must one not
renounce the emancipatory desire, it is necessary to insist on it more than ever , it seems and
insist on it, moreover, as the very indestructibility of the “it is necessary.” This is the
condition of a repoliticization, perhaps of another concept of the political. This future, as
promise to come, is exactly what cannot be narrated because there can be no end that
encloses the story. And, moreover, this future has nothing to do with heteronormativity,
fantasies of imaginary children, or narcissistic self projection . Or, in other words, since the future
is not “there” any more than the Real, it cannot be “fucked.” 18 Edelman’s relentless
struggle to keep us safe from the emancipatory desire ironically keeps us captured in the
jouissance of the Other, here positioned as the inevitability of capitalism , which hangs onto
us even as we buy our next sex toy. The future to come remains forever other because the
dead can never be put in their place, and they incessantly return to issue demands upon us in
the present. For Derrida, the heterogeneity of the Real, or of any event, is precisely that it is an ineffaceable trace. This is why
deconstruction, for Derrida, is justice, precisely in that it endlessly moves through the disjoining of time to keep open a place for the
other to come. Again to quote Derrida: This necessary disjointure, the de-totalizing condition of justice, is indeed here that of the
present — and by the same token the very condition of the present and of the presence of the present. This is where deconstruction
would always begin to take shape as the thinking of the gift and of undeconstructible justice, the undeconstructible condition of any
deconstruction, to be sure, but a condition that is itself in deconstruction and remains, and must remain (that is the injunction) in
the disjointure of the UnFug. Edelman would be wise to remember why the future to come matters to
us. Indeed as Derrida urgently reminds us, “Without the opening of this possibility, there remains,
perhaps, beyond good and evil, only the necessity of the worst. A necessity that would not
(even) be a fated one.” And for Edelman, it seems that queer theory is indeed fated by the
necessity of the worst in its purported identification with the death drive. The dead, or more
specifically, the specter, is for Derrida the thing that is no-thing in this world. And yet it is there as
a spectral asymmetry, which as Derrida writes, “desynchronizes,” in the sense that it confronts us with what is
other and remains an unmasterable disproportion. What Derrida names a “hauntology” is
precisely what forces us to be turned toward the dead as the other who calls to us and at the
same time disjoins the present so that what we inherit is also a promise to the future, not of
the Child, but of the ghost. Thus the future , for Derrida, is our inheritance, not our children’s.
And it is what always turns us to the other, and in that sense, the nonnarratable. This is a
completely different understanding of death, the future, and inheritance than the one offered
by Edelman in his insistence that queerness demands an identification with the death drive as
that which rejects futurity in a destructive embrace of jouissance in the present. Indeed, even
Lacan asserted that any “will to destruction” in the death drive fundamentally coexists with a
“will for an Otherthing [Autrechose].” It is by recognizing that both the symbolic and the
narrative structures of history are fantasies that we might open ourselves to a future beyond
— one that is indeed unknowable, but one that is ours to inherit.
Schopenhauer
Schopenhauer inherently places himself above the orient, the judge at the gate
that told it was okay for orient knowledge to be talked about among pomo.
Librett 14 Jeffrey S. Librett (Ph.D. Cornell University, 1989, Comparative Literature) is a
Professor of German, directs the interdepartmental German Studies Committee, and
participates in Comparative Literature, Judaic Studies, and Philosophy. Professor Librett has
written The Rhetoric of Cultural Dialogue: Jews and Germans from Moses Mendelssohn to
Richard Wagner and Beyond (Stanford University Press, 2000), and published numerous essays
on German literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, Jewish Studies, and theory from the
eighteenth century to the present. He has translated a number of texts from German and
French into English, including Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Sense of the World (University of Minnesota
Press, 1997) and Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, by Michel Deguy et al (State University
of New York Press, 1993). His second book is titled Orientalism and the Figure of the
Jew (Fordham University Press, fall 2015). https://books.google.com/books?
hl=en&lr=&id=W0xGCgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=schompenhauer+and+orientalism&ots=oP
ryhSeOsr&sig=1tUZvihjCv574uWHJd5MWr3h3LU#v=onepage&q=schompenhauer&f=false
pg.178 SP
The third aspect of Schopenhauer’s intervention that one must stress here occurs on the level
of the philosophy of history, especially in its Hegelian lineage, which is still in the process of
articulating itself as Schopenhauer contests the adequacy of its foundations. Schopenhauer’s
move at this level affects the ideologies. Although his thought develops in an Orientalist age-
marked by various Indomanias and Egyptomanias, preferences for Persians, and so on—more
than any other modern Western philosopher before him, Schopenhauer is able to set the
Oriental thought he most admires-ancient Indian thought-as the equal of any Western
philosophical achievement. This indication of the limits of Eurocentrism follows from
Schopenhauer’s implicit critique of the prefiguration fulfillment model-as the contrast with
Schlegel’s text on the Indians and with Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History illustrates
nicely. To see the Indian East as always already leading toward its fulfimment in the West, for
example, would require that Schopenhauer place himself above the East. But this is precisely
something that he is in principle disinclined to do, even if he struggles against this disinclination,
as we shall see. Finally this third insight reinforces the first: Schopenhauer’s idealization of
ancient Indian pessimism, his view of it as the ne plus ultra of philosophical achievements,
strengthens his commitment to the notion of the groundlessness of the will. Ancient Hundu
thought confirms Schopenhauer and guides him in his strictly philosophical explication of that
problem: the articulation of the (Libnizian) principle of sufficient reason with a revision of the
Kantian transcendtal account of experiential possibility-conditions. These three
Schopenhauerian gestures or displacements, then, hang together tightly, in a certain
Zusammenhang. The psiting of an abyss at the ontological origin, the questioning of typology,
and the recognition of an ancient Indian thought beyond the purview of Eurocentrism (at least
within certain limits)- these three points cohere in Schopenhauer’s oeuvre such that to unsettle
one is to unsettle them all. They are also points, however that challenge Schopenhauer himself.
For Schopenhauer is not quite ready to yield to the victor-his own innovations- the more
traditional stance that constitutes his point of departure.
Impacts
Abjection
The impact is abjection—turning bodies into objects and subjecting them to
racialized violence created by fear of an ‘other’
Lazaridas 15, Gabrielle, (Prof. at University of Leicester, Politics and International Relations)
Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship Series Standing Order
Contemporary reality requires citizenship not to be restricted to groups which aim to be ethnically and culturally homogeneous;
also, it must leave room for the accommodation of ethnic and cultural diversity within the nation-state, and for the usual recognition
of rights and diversity of both the majority and the minorities within the state. Citizenship is a prerequisite for the enjoyment of
human rights. But rights are conferred on and taken back from migrants according to the interests
of supranational and national entities (see Chapter 8). People may be the subjects of law, the bearers of rights and
obligations, but they can also be transformed by law and through law into abjects . The concept of
abject, which originated in the works of Kristeva (1982), exists between the concept of a subject and the
concept of an object. The abject is something which used once to be a subject, and which can
provoke a traumatic experience in one who comes into contact with it . A corpse, for example, used once
to be a subject; it is something Introduction 7 that should be alive but is not. According to Kristeva, the abject is ‘what
disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, position, rules’ , and so can also
include crimes such as those committed at Auschwitz. Such crimes are abject because they draw attention to the fragility of the law.
Thus, legal abject is connected to legal subject, the legal subject being the bearer of rights and
duties. Diametrically opposed, one with no rights and duties whatsoever could be characterised as a legal object , a res (a thing).
The legal abject refers to people and not to things. So, the legal abject represents the form of utmost
exclusion in society, and abjectification describes the state of often marginalised groups,
bodies excluded by law and through law, who eventually become repulsive to society at large
– such as the drug addict, the homeless, the convict, the poor, the aged or the disabled and, in
the case of this book, migrants. The abjectification process undergone by migrants leads towards exclusion and utmost
insecurity. The abject is a metaphor for the ultimate form of exclusion. The book aims to decipher
the complex web of structural, institutional and cultural contradictions which shape the
inclusion–exclusion dialectic and the multifaceted grid within which the ‘us’ becomes the
‘other’ and the ‘other’ becomes the ‘us’ within the transformation of European space into
transnational space within the wider globalisation process . Within this framework, the book identifies the
complex, multifaceted processes through which migrants are gradually transformed from legal subjects to repulsive legal abjects,
excluded by the host society, through the process which I describe here as abjectification, one which leads to a variety of forms of
human (in)security. As De Genova (2007: 440) argues, ‘during an era when the abjection of non-citizens has become scandalously
routine and the insecurity of citizens has been rendered a political resource of onerous gravity, the gathering revolt of the denizens
may yet signal a stringent clarification of our universal political predicament – as always – already susceptible to suspicion, always –
already potentially culprits’. He adds: ‘Within the global regime of capital accumulation, the more flagrant abjection of the world of
denizens only shows, to the more properly domesticated citizen, the image of their own future’ ( ibid.). One way or another, we are
all marginalised, susceptible to a possible process of abjectification . One
way to abjectify the ‘other’ is by
racialising it, and by using the racialisation process in an exclusionary way . Togral (2011: 221) argues
that, in recent years, ‘the securitization of migration and “new racism” have been converged under
the “auspice” of the cultural differenceas-a-threat narrative’ . What is ‘new racism’? It is racism based on the
8 International Migration into Europe discriminatory treatment of the ‘other’ on the basis of one’s national origin or ethnicity and
without reference to colour or phenotype, as opposed to the ‘old racism’ which was based on discriminatory treatment at the hands
of a race (a biological group) different from one’s own. New racism is a ‘shift in racism, from notions of biological superiority, to
exclusion based on cultural and national difference’ (Ibrahim 2005: 164). In addition, new racism dispenses with the notion of
superiority. Instead, the focal point is difference. As Babacan et al. (2009: 10) argue, ‘the proponents of new racism claim that they
are not being racist or prejudiced, nor are they making any value judgements about the “others”, but simply recognising that they
[the others] are different’. This
difference forms the basis for ‘legitimate’ and contemporary concerns
about issues that are generalised as posing a threat to the values and beliefs that are
cherished by the community. As Wieviorka (1995: 43) explains, ‘racism no longer means relations of domination, but
rather the setting apart, the exclusion (and in extreme cases the destruction) of races [cultures and ethnic groups] which are thought
to pose a threat’. These arguments authorise the belief that people who are part of the same culture or nation are devoid of
differences of any kind, and that different cultures or newcomers can disturb this ‘unity’ or ‘homogeneity’ of society. This
essentialism has made it possible for right wing extremist groups to build their arguments
around the defence of ‘our values’, ‘our identity’ or ‘our way of life’. As illustrated by the section on the
burqa in this book, these essentialist projections onto migrants and ethnic minorities have
strengthened the hand of right-wing, populist discourse and racist framing of certain groups of
migrants; they have been used to reinforce their marginalisation and exclusion, and lead to
their abjectification . Of course, within the inclusion–exclusion continuum there is differentiation according to one’s gender,
ethnic background, skills, age and so on. So, intersectionality is important in order to understand the different forms and degrees of
abjectification that exist. Abjectification is not static; it is a process that constantly moves and
mutates. Migrants, depending on where they are in the abject–éject–inject–subject
continuum, experience differential inclusion, being characterised as a security threat, targeted
by the mission to ‘democratise and civilise the others’ who have been framed as backward
and primitive. The list is endless. In addition, there is the danger of falling into the ‘denial of abjectification’ trap, which is
similar to the denial of racism trap (see Nelson 2013). Within this, governments can argue that migrants and
minorities today experience less racism than in the past (temporal deflection), or that
Introduction 9 abjectification is worse in other countries, including those from which immigrants
have come. It can also take the form of a more localised deflection, in which racism is
pronounced ‘not a problem around here’: spatial deflection, which suggests that abjectification is not an
overwhelming problem; deflection from the mainstream: racism is not an overwhelming problem; or outright rejection of its
existence: absence discourse. These barriers (structural or otherwise) prohibit individuals from making claims of being excluded or
abjectified. The discursive fields allowed by such approaches are narrow, limiting the range of possibilities for anti-racism, anti-
discrimination and anti-exclusion measures to be discussed at the local level; and the importance of acknowledging exclusion and
abjectification is brought into sharp relief, particularly at the institutional and systemic level. Acknowledgement of these forms of
‘othering’ in Europe is necessary, and is what this book attempts to achieve.
Capitalism/Neoliberalism
Orientalist discourse reifies capitalism- only rejection can prevent China’s
transition into becoming “us.”
Vukovich 12 (professor of critical and cultural theory as well as postcolonial and China studies
at Hong Kong University, Daniel, “China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and
the PRC,” pgs. 1-2, 2012)//DD
When one recalls the Marxist cultural analysis of capital as such, namely as an historical force of
abstraction that makes unlike things alike on the basis of some third thing called the value-form
(their “exchange value” or “general equivalent”), the relationship between this orientalism and
global capitalism appears in sharper relief. Sinological-orientalism is in an important sense a
capital-logic, just as historical capitalism betrays an orientalist one. As Said himself made clear
(in at least my reading of him), orientalism and colonial discourse may precede the rise of
capitalism, but in the modern era they are hand in glove. So, too, for the present moment,
whereby Western investment and “constrainment” strategies are often rationalized on the basis
of these being beneficial to the Chinese and their progression towards democracy and human
rights (whatever these mean), as well as helping “balance” and protect the rest of Asia from
China’s rise. I further address the relationship between orientalist and capital logics in a final
chapter. My argument is a totalizing, “functionalist” one about the integral relationship between
capitalism and orientalism. But then, so is the thing. The historical conditions of possibility for a
global Sinological-orientalism are the momentous if not counter-revolutionary changes within
China itself – its Dengist “era of reform and opening up” dating from 1979 – and the West’s
economic, political, and discursive responses to this subsequent rise to global prominence. This
paradoxical relationship is captured in the logic of becoming- sameness: China is still not
“normal” (and has been tragically different), but is engaged in a “universal” process such that it
will, and must, become the same as “us.” Whether it wants to or not. That is the present–
future offered to China within this discourse, and – as anyone who watched the 2008 Olympics
opening ceremonies knows (“one world, one dream”) – it is also one taken up within China
itself.
Colonialization
Orientalism justifies colonization, territorialization, and imperialisism due to its
feminization of China.
Leong 5 (Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at Arizona State University, Karen, “The China
Mystique Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong, Mayling Soong, and the Transformation of American
Orientalism,” University of California Press, pgs. 2-3, 2005)//DD
Orientalism’s incipient form derived from nineteenth-century European imperialist imaginings of Asia’s cultures and peoples through the lens of
European values, norms, and culture. American orientalism draws on orientalism more generally to affirm
the political, social, and cultural superiority of the United States and European Americans
relative to Asia and Asian Americans. One especially powerful discursive trope of orientalism
is the exoticization and feminization of Asian nations and their cultures. As viewed through the
lens of gendered and heteronormative relations of power, European and American orientalism
justified power inequities resulting from colonization, territorialization, and imperialist
destiny. Although American orientalism could be and was applied to any Asian culture generally, the United States’ relations with China and Japan
from the republican era through the 1940s shaped a particular form of American orientalism that in turn directly affected U.S.
foreign policy toward Japan and China, immigration policy for Chi- nese and Japanese immigrants, legal decisions
on the rights of Americans of Chinese and Japanese descent, and representations of “the
Orient” in mass-produced, popular culture.
Orientalism replicates colonialist tactics – causes western intervention and

endless warfare
Almond 7 (Ian, literary scholar and writer, Professor of World Literature at Georgetown
University, Published in 2007 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd, “THE NEW ORIENTALISTS: Postmodern
representations of Islam from Foucault to Baudrillard”) RR Jr
Standing at the forked path of the Other and the Same, Baudrillard takes the Foucauldian option of clinical, non-partisan, pseudo-anthropological
observation intermingled with tacit sympathy, rather than any explicit expression of solidarity in the manner of Nietzsche’s ‘Peace and friendship with
Islam! War to the knife with Rome!’: The
crucial stake, the decisive stake in this whole affair is the
consensual reduction of Islam to the global order. Not to destroy but to domesticate it, by
whatever means: modernisation, even military, politicisation, nationalism, democracy, the
Rights of Man, anything at all to electrocute the resistances and the symbolic challenge that
Islam represents for the entire West … All that is singular and irreducible must be reduced and absorbed. This is the law of
democracy and the New World Order. In this sense, the Iran–Iraq war was a successful first phase: Iraq served to liquidate the most radical form of anti-
Western challenge, even though it never defeated it. (pp. 85–6) Although it is not difficult to discern an underlying Mitgefuhl for Islam (one which will
become more explicitly stated in Baudrillard’s later writings on the Twin Towers), the tone of the passage still affects the neutral observer of a contest
between two opposing, unequal forces. What is most striking about Baudrillard’s concluding thoughts is the
almost complete absence of any characteristics or qualities Islam might have, other than that
of pure disruption. Defined in terms of what it is not (‘Islam is that which does not fit the New World Order’), the central quality of the faith
becomes its anarchic energy, its wild potential to subvert, its unpredictable alterity. The strength of Islam is what comes
through most clearly in this passage, even if the strength is the strength of the fanatic, of the
mentally unstable. When Baudrillard speaks elsewhere of the ‘virulent and ungraspable
instability of the Arabs and of Islam, whose defence is that of the hysteric in all his versatility’ (p.
36), we realize that his approval of Islam’s resistance to the New World Order is more
mischievous than Nietzschean. Even in correctly ascertaining some of the real, underlying reasons for
the Gulf War, Baudrillard cannot reinforce his assertions without resorting to age-old
metaphors of irrational Arabs and hysterical mullahs. Once again, we have a critique that
paradoxically challenges modernity while making explicit use of its vocabulary. Islam and Baudrillard |
173 In concluding, two final points need to be made concerning Baudrillard’s use of Islam as a final bastion of resistance against an increasingly
unilateral world order – the first concerns
the place of Islam in the end of the West , the second concerns Islam and
Baudrillard’s theories of ecstasy and excess. At the end of Chapter 4, we saw how the apocalyptic overtones associated with
Islam in Borges’ story drew on a long medieval tradition, one that interpreted the coming of the Moors as a precursor to the Day of Judgment. The
Turks were unconvertible, Luther wrote in 1542, they were a sign of the end of the Age.16 Equally, Arabs
are also described as
‘unconvertible’ in Baudrillard’s book (p. 37); like Luther’s Turks, they are hopelessly beyond redemption,
utterly incapable of being reintegrated into the Protestant capitalist world order . Part of the attraction of
the Islamist for Baudrillard throughout The Gulf War Did Not Take Place is this ideological obstinacy of the Muslim, the dialogue-proof impenetrability
of their dogma. That their advent signifies in some way the imminent self-destruction of the West is a point that Baudrillard goes on to make ten years
later, in an essay on the events of September 11, ‘Hypothèses sur le terrorisme’. In this piece Baudrillard
quotes the remarkable letter of
Philippe Muray, ‘Dear Jihadists’, in which the writer reinscribes the
terrorism of Islamic extremists within a darker,
Occidental destiny as a symptom of Western decay (‘We made you, you jihadists and terrorists, and you will end up
prisoners of our resemblance … You cannot kill us, because we are already dead’).17 The mood of Islam as a pseudodivine judgment upon the
morally/intellectually bankrupt West is already introduced; what Baudrillard
goes on to suggest is not simply that
Islamism is a symptom of the decline of the West, but also that its manifestation has become a
tool of Occidental suicide: When Western culture sees all its values extinguished one by one, it spins inwardly towards the worst. For us,
our death is an extinction, an annihilation, it is not a symbolic exchange – that is our misfortune … The singularity, in killing itself, suicides the other with
the same blow – one could say that acts of terrorism have literally ‘suicided’ the West.18 For Luther, ultimately, the Turks had no value in themselves,
no 174 | Islam, ‘theory’ and Europe intrinsic worth, no potential for salvation. Their principal significance was semiotic – the value of a signpost,
warning of the end ahead. Baudrillard’s ‘unconvertible’ Arabs and ‘irreducible’ Islamists, one can’t help feeling, perform a similar ontological function.
Their disruption, extremism, radical incompatibility are all symptoms of the end of what Fanon called ‘the European game’; their utter alterity
announces, perhaps not apocalyptically, the philosophical (if not economic or military) collapse of Western hegemony. Nevertheless, for all
Baudrillard’s lip-service to the ‘irreducible’ otherness of Islam, the supposedly uncontrollable
alterity of its followers does become reinscribed into the destiny of the West ; by redescribing
the extremities of Islam as the ‘suicide’ of the West, Baudrillard repeats Luther’s gesture in a much deeper
sense – not simply by linking Islam with some form of end-of-millennium eschatology, but also by turning
Islam into a peripheral consequence of the West, a side-effect of the Occident, an a posteriori
hiccup of modernity. Zygmunt Bauman has described Baudrillard as a philosopher who ‘patches up the identity of his
world out of absences alone’.19 What is most surprising about the use Baudrillard makes of Islam in his
inimitable critique of modernity is how radically empty Islam becomes – how, in a sense, the
semantic emptiness of Islam comes to reflect the much graver moral and ontological emptiness
of the West. We are reminded of Baudrillard’s own thoughts on the ecstatic excess of the object, how the qualities of entities gyrate ever faster
until they lose all meaning: ‘Reality itself founders in hyperrealism … it becomes reality for its own sake, the fetishism of the lost object: no longer the
object of representation, but the ecstasy of denial and of its own ritual extermination: the hyperreal.’20 In witnessing the gradual progression of
representations of Islam and Arabs in Baudrillard’s work – feudal Orientals, cunning Arabs,
empty wars, endlessly energetic Islamists, culminating in an Islam which is nothing more than
an incompatibility to the West, a photographic negative of the Occident – one wonders
whether Islam itself has not undergone a kind of ecstasy (literally ex-stasis), an ecstatic self-emptying of identity, a
vertiginous transformation into hyper-Islam, just as Baudrillard’s reality has spun itself dizzily
into the hyperreal. For all the positive advantages that Baudrillard’s encounter with Islam may
offer to the Muslim critic – a decentring and cultural re-finitizing of modernity’s truth claims, an awareness of the equally fierce
fundamentalisms of the secular Enlightenment, not to mention a classic exposition of the media’s transformation of war into pure semiotica – this
semantic hollowing-out of Islam may well be the inevitable consequence of any sustained
meeting between Islam and the postmodern
Dichotomies
The aff’s creation of the Other reinforces violent dichotomies
Said 3 (Edward Said, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University,
“Preface to Orientalism” Al-Ahram Weekly, August 25 2003 http://www.fsor.it/varia/Edward
%20Said%20-%20Preface%20to%20Orientalism.htm) RR Jr
The terrible conflicts that herd people under falsely unifying rubrics like "America", "The West "
or "Islam" and invent collective identities for large numbers of individuals who are actually quite
diverse, cannot remain as potent as they are, and must be opposed . We still have at our disposal the rational
interpretive skills that are the legacy of humanistic education, not as a sentimental piety enjoining us to return to traditional values or the classics but
Critical thought
as the active practice of worldly secular rational discourse. The secular world is the world of history as made by human beings.
does not submit to commands to join in the ranks marching against one or another approved
enemy. Rather than the manufactured clash of civilisations , we need to concentrate on the slow
working together of cultures that overlap , borrow from each other, and live together in far more
interesting ways than any abridged or inauthentic mode of understanding can allow. But for that kind of wider perception
we need time, patient and sceptical enquiry, supported by faith in communities of interpretation that are difficult
to sustain in a world demanding instant action and reaction.
Laundry List
Orientalism creates a mindset that justifies colonialism, hypersexualization, and
otherization
While Orientalism led to a Western fascination with Asia as an exotic land — equal parts
captivatingly romantic and terrifyingly barbaric — perhaps the most important aspect of Orientalism is how it defined Asian men and
women against the Western norms of gender identity. Compared to stalwart European men and chaste European
women, Asian men and women were recast in the European imagination as specific counter-
points to these expected gender norms: Asian women became hypersexualized, unsatiable,
creatures — in one Medieval text described as standing thirteen feet tall and having ox-tails emerging from their genitals, whereas described by Marco Polo as either
“dainty” courtesans or voracious prostitutes — whereas Asian men are portrayed as slight, stooping, meek and
unassertive barbarians who attack in faceless hordes to make up for their easy defeat in single combat by European men.
Furthermore, in Orientalism, the land of the Orient is, itself, feminized, which invites subsequent
conquest — in overtly sexual language — by the virile West . Polo discusses the many Asian wives that Western traders take,
literally wresting the Asian woman from the Asian man. Columbus’ endeavour to discover Asia by sea was cast as “taking possession” of these lands. Thus, in Orientalism, the
Orient is not merely the “Other” of the West, but an Other that stands as a prize or trophy, to be
dominated or conquered by the West . Importantly, when the West is the standard against which the
Orient is defined, the Orient cannot, by definition, be a point of empathy . As defined in its distance from norm,
Asia instead becomes a thing to be possessed, and populated with a people who are “not quite
normal” and therefore “not quite human ”. In short, when the Orient becomes a land of the “Other”,
the people of the Orient become the “Other” , too; Orientalism becomes dehumanization. This, not
surprisingly, paved the way for multiple Western efforts to colonize — economically, culturally, and militaristically — Asia. I
needn’t go into the many examples of the West’s incursions into the East , all of which share at their core the perception
that the West has a moral and cultural imperative to subdue through whatever means necessary the bizarre
traditions and abnormal people of the Eastern “Other” based entirely upon the Orient’s “deviancy”.
Oreintailist discourse leads to racist violence.

the PRC,” pg. 5, 2012)//DD
But the force of general equivalence within Sinological-orientalism is not only a capital-logic . It
partakes of other histories, just as Sinology itself must be seen as part of the long history of
imperialism, colonialism, and trade.7 Thus this knowledge formation must be understood as a part of historical colonialism and
its mission civilisatrice. The logic of sameness also dovetails with missionary discourse and the older French
universalist logic of the civilizing mission (all “natives” can become the same as “us”). For all its at times explicit racism about
cruelty and backwardness, Chinese and missionary discourse in China also pre-supposed the
belief that they were “equal,” that they could and must be saved, and made the Christian-
same. This is akin to French imperialism’s own mission of bringing civilization to the colonized
– who could and would reach the next level in due course, with the right (colonial) governance and administration. As anti-colonial theory has
instructed from Lenin to Fanon and beyond, this evolutionary, teleological discourse of sameness, of bringing History and civilization to the colonized,
both rationalized colonial rule and literally reshaped colonial and metropolitan societies. This emphasis on sameness, particularly in the contemporary
moment, also points to a gap in Said’s analysis: that in some colonial and neo-colonial contexts it is not simply allowed but mandated that the “Other”
become the “Same.”
Stan- dard developmental economics would be another case in point. The older,
more racist logic of essential difference is here in abeyance.
Cambodian, Laotian, and Vietnamese American student studies show that the
model minority myth is false
Pang et al 17 (Valerie Ooka Pang, professor at SDSU, “Academic Needs and Family Factors in
the Education of Southeast Asian American Students: Dismantling the Model Minority Myth”,
2017 http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1154&context=jsaaea, DOA:
7/1/17)//AK
The “model minority” is a stereotype that serves as an obstacle to Asian American groups such
as Cambodian American, Laotian American, and Vietnamese American students who are not
receiving equality in education. The findings of this study demonstrate that there are Asian
American students who like some African American students have problems with reading and
math in school. The performance of Cambodian American, Laotian American, and Vietnamese
American students is heavily influenced by their socioeconomic status. Students who are
participants in the school lunch program perform significantly lower than students who are not
members of the school lunch program. In addition, it is important to note that students whose
parents have more educational experiences do better in math and reading on the CAT/6
assessment.
This study looked at almost a million students from the state of California who were in the
seventh grade in 2003–2008. The findings of this study show the existence of a large
achievement gap between Whites and African Americans, Cambodian Americans, and Laotian
Americans in reading and math. Whites compared to African Americans do significantly better in
both math and reading with high effect sizes. In addition, whites also perform significantly
higher than Cambodian American and Laotian students in math and reading, with sizable effect
sizes. Though there was a significant difference found between whites and Vietnamese in
reading, the effect size was minimal. There was also a significant difference found between
Vietnamese American students and their White peers in math where Vietnamese had a higher
mean score. The effect size was fairly strong.
Parent education levels among the groups significantly influenced the achievement of all ethnic/racial groups in both reading and math. The researchers in this study believe
that school lunch status and parent education levels are highly correlated and therefore demonstrate strong interactions. In addition, both ethnicity and school lunch status, and
ethnicity and parent education levels showed interactions. In the United States, income and ethnicity are aspects of society that are highly correlated and shown to make major
differences in the achievement of students (Obradović, Long, Cutulli, Chan, Hinz, Heistad, & Matsen, 2009). Students who are members of low-income score lower than learners
who are members of high-income families. There is more risk that these students do not have as many opportunities as students whose parents have higher levels of education
and income.
Conclusion
The study shows the academic needs for reading and math among students of color from African American, Cambodian American, Laotian American, and Vietnamese American
families. Intervention is needed for these students in the area of reading. Students of color scored significantly lower than Whites on the reading assessment. There has been
much research that has indicated that AAPIs and other students of color need programs that address vocabulary development, writing, and comprehension skills (Kiang &
Many Southeast Asian American students may be English

Kaplan, 1994; Pang, 1990; Pang, Han, & Pang, 2011; Suzuki, 2002).
language learners or from second generation families where their parents do not speak
Standard English at home; parents may speak a heritage language (Portes & Rumbaut, 2001;
Rumbaut, 1995). Though many children may not speak the heritage language and understand
what is spoken, they may not have the language modeling needed to develop high-level
vocabulary in English. The children also may have more trouble learning how to write because they have not had the opportunity to read print and digital
materials if their families have limited financial resources. Writing is difficult for many students because it is a complex process. Students need a strong command of English and
have developed high level language skills. Students must be able to think logically and produce a clear argument. We highly recommend that schools develop writing
intervention programs for these students to teach them how to effectively communicate in writing.
This study also demonstrated that contrary to the “model minority” myth, Cambodian
American and Laotian American students performed significantly lower in math than their
White American peers. This again demonstrates the need for schools to provide intervention
programs in math for Southeast Asian students along with their African American counterparts.
This is probably one of the most serious findings because the stereotype of the nerdy, math
and science AAPI student is pervasive within this country. Many teachers do not believe that
Asian American students are in need of assistance in mathematics because of this powerful
myth.
In summary, not all Southeast Asian American students perform on the same level. There are
differences. In this study, Vietnamese American students attained significantly higher levels of
achievement in both reading and math than their Cambodian American and Laotian American
peers. Looking forward, research that examines differences in gender, generation in the United
States, and when student families arrived in the United States may be fruitful areas of
investigation. These characteristics may be valuable in explaining the differences between the
academic achievement of Vietnamese Americans, Cambodian Americans, and Laotian
Americans. There is a great diversity among Southeast Asians and more study is needed.
Finding larger numbers of Southeast Asian Americans could bring to light important elements about the diversity within the community. Though this study examined the
performance of three Southeast Asian American communities, the population also includes individuals with ancestry from the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and
Indonesia. If the achievement of additional Cambodian American and Laotian American students could be located, similar disaggregate analyses could be performed. Though this
study did not have enough students to create two separate groups, Cambodian American and Laotian American students come from distinctly different countries and cultures.
School personnel should also consider providing a parent liaison to assist Cambodian, Laotian, and Vietnamese parents. Even if parents do not speak English well, they can still
volunteer in the school. For example, parents may put up bulletin boards, collect library books, and copy materials for teachers. Their efforts help teachers and parents as active
members of the school community will learn about what goes on in schools. Parents who would like to participate in schools can contribute to their children’s education. Also
some parents may want to attend evening Open Houses or PTA meetings. However, if they do not have transportation to the school, some principals have provided buses to pick
up and take home parents who live in the neighborhood. This is another way to encourage parent involvement in school affairs.
Cambodian American, Laotian American, African American, and Vietnamese American

students need academic interventions in both reading and math. Equal educational
opportunity is not being provided to many of these students. The achievement gap between
these groups and whites still exists and the “model minority” myth is a major reason for the
lack of educational opportunities and interventions needed.
The model minority myth has been particularly harmful for Hmong Americans –
racialization causes them to be whitened as model minorities despite low
achievement and blackened when they protest these standards
Lee et al 17 (STACEY LEE, professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies and
faculty affiliate in Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “The Model
Minority Maze: Hmong Americans Working Within and Around Racial Discourses”, 2017
http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1153&context=jsaaea, DOA:
7/1/17)//AK
**edited for ableist language

Hmong people, often referred to as Miao or Meo in Asia, are an ethnic group that originated
from China and Southeast Asia. During the Second Indochina War (Vietnam War) and the Secret
War in Laos, Hmong people in Laos were recruited as guerilla fighters to support American
troops against the Communist-backed North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and Pathet Lao forces
(Cha, 2010; Quincy, 2012; Vang, 2008). After the United States pulled out of Vietnam in 1975,
Hmong people became targets for ethnic and political persecution (Vang, 2008). As a result of
their involvement with the U.S. military, Hmong people were forced to flee from Laos to
Thailand, the United States, and other European countries as refugees. After initial resettlement
across the United States, many Hmong people engaged in secondary migration to California and
several Midwestern states in order to maintain kinship ties and co-ethnic networks, build social
and cultural capital, increase economic opportunities, and gain access to different and better
educational opportunities (Chan, 1991; Office of Refugee Resettlement, 1984; Vang, 2008).
Hmong Americans have experienced economic and academic challenges since their
resettlement in the United States in the mid-1970s.
Race has been a central organizing principle in the United States since the formation of the
nation, and research on immigrants and refugees reveals that the process of racialization is
central to becoming American (Abu El-Haj, 2015; Lee, 2005; Olsen, 1997). The dominant
discourse on race centers on the White and Black dichotomy that associates Whites with
desirable and positive characteristics and Blacks with undesirable and negative characteristics
(Feagin, 2000). Scholarship on Asian Americans has shown that the two dominant racial
discourses surrounding Asian Americans are the image of Asians as “perpetual foreigners” and
the image of Asian Americans as “model minorities” (Fong, 2008; Lee, 2014; Okihiro, 1994).
According to the “perpetual foreigner” stereotype, Asian Americans are continuously positioned
as outsiders based on binaries of profound cultural differences: Eastern versus Western,
preliterate versus modern. As noted previously, the model minority stereotype suggests that
Asian Americans have achieved widespread academic and economic success through hard
work and adherence to traditional Asian cultural norms. While there has been a lot of attention
to the academic and economic achievements associated with the model minority image, it is
important to point out that the stereotype also includes significant behavioral characteristics—
hard work, self-sufficiency, obedience, respect, compliance, etc. (Petersen, 1966). Like other
Asian Americans, Hmong Americans are rejected for their “foreignness” through the discourse
of cultural differences, yet they are accepted as “honorary Whites” when they perform model
minority achievements and behavior (Tuan, 1998). These racial discourses shape
(mis)understandings of Hmong Americans in educational spaces. The educational experiences,
particularly the causes of educational inequity among Hmong Americans, are often understood
to be the result of cultural clashes or cultural differences between Hmong culture and
mainstream U.S. culture (Donnelly, 1994; Rumbaut & Ima, 1988; Sherman, 1988). Within the
cultural clash discourse, Hmong culture is depicted as homogenous, fixed, savage and primitive
in comparison to modern Western culture (DePouw, 2012; Ngo, 2008). Hones (2002), for
example, argues that due to cultural differences and limited English proficiency, parents “don’t
know what to expect from American schools, how to be involved, or what questions to ask
regarding the schooling their children are receiving” (p. 46). Similarly, Lee and Green (2008)
attribute Hmong American students’ poor academic achievement to parents not being educated
and not keeping track of their children’s whereabouts. Xiong and Huang (2011) argue that
students’ low motivation level for education accounts for delinquent behaviors. As these
examples demonstrate, the cultural clash discourse defaults to an individualist argument that
blames parents and individuals for poor academic achievements and high truancy rates (Lee,
2015; Xiong et al., 2008). In other words, an exclusive focus on cultural differences overlooks
systematic inequities (Lee, 2001).
Binary assumptions regarding Asian versus mainstream American culture and deficit perspectives on languages other than English have been identified with English as a Second
Language (ESL) programs that promote English monolingualism (Xiong & Xiong, 2011). While ESL programs do provide resources for newcomers and English learners, Xiong and
Zhou’s (2006) study point out that Hmong Americans are tracked into ESL based on the assumption that Hmong Americans need ESL programming simply because Hmong is
spoken in the home. Importantly, research demonstrates that placement in ESL classes tracks students into lower academic classes that limit academic success (Callahan, 2005;
Xiong & Zhou, 2006).
As Asian Americans, the Hmong American community is also judged against the standards of
the model minority stereotype. The scholarship on Hmong Americans and U.S. Census data on
Hmong Americans reveal that Hmong students often struggle to achieve the levels of economic
and academic achievement associated with the model minority stereotype (Ngo, 2006; Ngo &
Lee, 2007). Given the Black and White discourse of race in the United States, the academic and
economic struggles experienced by Hmong Americans and other Southeast Asians lead to the
ideologically blackening of these communities (DePouw, 2012; Lee, 2005; Ong, 1999). Lee’s
(2005) study of Hmong Americans at University Heights School (UHS) reveals the ways that race
and racism frame the educational experiences of Hmong Americans. In particular, Lee
discovered that Hmong Americans at UHS who aspired to high academic achievement and
reflected “traditional” Hmong values were viewed [thought of positively] by their teachers. In
contrast to the “traditional” students, many of the self-identified “Americanized” students
questioned the value of education and adopted hip-hop styles of clothing and language
associated with African American youth culture. As a result of the way the “Americanized”
students performed their identities they were viewed negatively by their teachers. Most
significantly, these “Americanized” students were compared to African American students or
ideologically blackened within the school and thus excluded from opportunities.
Adding to Lee (2005), DePouw (2012) argues that colonialism and racism are embedded in the
process of Hmong racialization based on the Black/White binary. Beyond statistical
performances of the model minority and being ideologically blackened, DePouw’s (2006, 2012)
discussion of Black/White binary suggests that the process of Hmong racialization is also tied to
behavioral performances. Despite Hmong Americans' academic and economic struggles,
Hmong Americans are still expected to behaviorally perform a non-complaining citizenship.
When Hmong American students help institutions recruit “diversity,” promote cultural events,
and graduate from their programs despite academic struggles, Hmong Americans successfully
performed the behavioral aspects of the model minority. On the contrary, Hmong Americans
are blackened when they engage in student activism, demand curriculum inclusivity in
schools, and request for meaningful inclusion in campus decision-making process. In the
performance of the model minority, Hmong Americans achieve honorary whiteness. When
they engage in resistance, Hmong Americans become blackened. This process of racialization
systematically silences and polices Hmong Americans to perform the model minority.
Hmong Americans are consequently rendered invisible, stuck within the model
minority myth – critical consciousness key
Lee et al 17 (STACEY LEE, professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies and
faculty affiliate in Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “The Model
Minority Maze: Hmong Americans Working Within and Around Racial Discourses”, 2017
http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1153&context=jsaaea, DOA:
7/1/17)//AK
Our research shows that Hmong people still struggle to be seen after over thirty-five years in
the United States. Whether cast as model minorities or as “failed” and underachieving Asian
Americans, the complex experiences of Hmong Americans are invisible. Quantitative data on
Hmong American students in one school district in Dane County, Wisconsin suggests that the
academic needs of Hmong American students are going largely unaddressed. Our middle-class
and low-income participants are equally concerned about the invisibility of the Hmong
American community and both groups recognize the role that the model minority stereotype
plays in making the community invisible. In fact, their respective responses to the model
minority stereotype are directly tied to their responses to invisibility. Although both our middle-
class and our low-income participants are invested in advocating for the Hmong American
communities, they take different approaches that reflect their respective class positions.
For middle-class participants, the dilemma appears to be about how to make visible the
concerns facing Hmong American students without contributing to a deficit discourse. In other
words, they want to draw attention to the academic challenges facing Hmong American
students and build on assumptions regarding the good behavior of Hmong American students.
As such, their response appears to be a partial challenge to the model minority stereotype.
Their ambivalence regarding the model minority stereotype suggests that they recognize that
being cast as model minorities is a form of relative racial privilege (Cheng, 2013). Their
reluctance to directly challenge the stereotype, however, suggests that they may also recognize
that despite their relative success that they are still constrained by the racial discourses
controlled by the dominant group (i.e., Whites). Finally, it is important to point out that our
middle-class Hmong American participants appear to be crafting a strategy for advocacy that
involves framing the concerns of the Hmong American community as largely distinct and
separate from concerns facing other communities of color. Here, they are implicitly drawing on
a discourse that Asians are neither Black nor White (Ancheta, 2003; Okihiro, 1994; Wu, 2002).
In contrast, our low-income Hmong American participants are highly critical of the model
minority stereotype. Their critique of the model minority stereotype is based on a larger
critique of White supremacy and a commitment to cross-racial coalition building with Black
communities. The differences between the ways our middle-class and our low-income
participants make sense of and respond to the model minority stereotype point to the complex
and important ways that race and class intersect in the lives of Hmong Americans in the United
States. (Ng, Lee & Pak, 2007). Regardless of social class background, however, the experiences
of our participants illustrate that Hmong Americans cannot escape racialization, including racial
stereotypes. Our research also demonstrates that the model minority stereotype may be a
form of relative racial privilege, but it also contributes to the invisibility of Hmong American
and other Southeast Asian students (Lee, 2005, 2009; Museus, 2009; Wing, 2007).
While most of the educational scholarship on the model minority stereotype has focused on
issues of achievement, our research contributes to the scholarship that has pointed to the role
of behavior in being cast as a model minority (Bascara, 2006; Osajima, 1988; Wu, 2003). Not
insignificantly, “good” behavior is defined as obedience towards and compliance with the
dominant norms and rules. Indeed, our research suggests that even in the absence of high
academic achievement, Southeast Asian American students continue to be labeled as model
minorities as long as the behavioral component is being performed . Future research should
focus more attention on how Asian American students’ behavior shapes ideas regarding the
model minority stereotype. Finally, our research demonstrates that the model minority
stereotype continues to shape Asian American experiences and identities in the 21st century,
which highlights the fact that critically conscious educational research on the impact of the
stereotype remains relevant and crucial.
War
Orientalist logic justifies endless war
Said 3 (Edward Said, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University,
“Preface to Orientalism” Al-Ahram Weekly, August 25 2003 http://www.fsor.it/varia/Edward
%20Said%20-%20Preface%20to%20Orientalism.htm) RR Jr
But there is a difference between knowledge of other peoples and other times that is the result of understanding, compassion, careful study and
analysis for their own sakes, and knowledge that is part of an overall campaign of self-affirmation. There
is, after all, a profound
difference between the will to understand for purposes of co-existence and enlargement of
horizons, and the will to dominate for the purposes of control . It is surely one of the intellectual catastrophes of
history that an imperialist war confected by a small group of unelected US officials was waged
against a devastated Third World dictatorship on thoroughly ideological grounds having to do
with world dominance, security control, and scarce resources, but disguised for its true intent ,
hastened, and reasoned for by Orientalists who betrayed their calling as scholars. ¶ The major influences on George W Bush's Pentagon and
National Security Council were men such as Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, experts on the Arab and Islamic world who
helped the American hawks to think about such preposterous phenomena as the Arab mind and
centuries-old Islamic decline which only American power could reverse. Today bookstores in
the US are filled with shabby screeds bearing screaming headlines about Islam and terror, Islam
exposed, the Arab threat and the Muslim menace, all of them written by political polemicists pretending to knowledge
imparted to them and others by experts who have supposedly penetrated to the heart of these strange
Oriental peoples. Accompanying such war-mongering expertise have been CNN and Fox, plus myriad evangelical and right-
wing radio hosts, innumerable tabloids and even middle-brow journals, all of them re-cycling the same unverifiable fictions
and vast generalisations so as to stir up "America" against the foreign devil.¶ Without a well-organised
sense that these people over there were not like "us" and didn't appreciate "our" values -- the
very core of traditional Orientalist dogma -- there would have been no war. So from the very same directorate of
paid professional scholars enlisted by the Dutch conquerors of Malaysia and Indonesia, the British armies of
India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, West Africa, the French armies of Indochina and North Africa, came the American advisers to
the Pentagon and the White House, using the same clichés , the same demeaning stereotypes, the same
justifications for power and violence (after all, runs the chorus, power is the only language they understand) in this case as in the
earlier ones. These people have now been joined in Iraq by a whole army of private contractors and eager entrepreneurs to whom shall be confided
every thing, from the writing of textbooks and the constitution to the refashioning of Iraqi political life and its oil industry. ¶ Every
single
empire, in its official discourse, has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances
are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilise , bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last
resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires.
Alts
Chink
The word chink provides a temporal disruption within the western lexicon. Our
process of linguistic guerilla disruption within the confines of the academy is
key to flip the script.
Tam 17 Simon Tam (@SimonTheTam) is the founder and bassist of the Slants.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/opinion/the-power-of-repurposing-a-slur.html//SP
My first real lesson on the power of language was at the age of 11. On the basketball courts at
school in San Diego, I was tormented by other students. They’d throw balls, punches, rocks
and insults, while yelling “gook” and “Jap.” One day, I had enough. I threw back, “I’m a chink,
get it right.” Stunned, they didn’t know what to do. Confused, they stopped. The act of
claiming an identity can be transformational. It can provide healing and empowerment. It can
weld solidarity within a community. And, perhaps most important, it can diminish the power
of an oppressor, a dominant group. The idea of reappropriation isn’t new. The process of
turning negative words, symbols or ideas into positive parts of our own identity can involve
repurposing a racial epithet or taking on a stereotype for sociopolitical empowerment. But
reappropriation can be confusing. Sometimes people can’t figure out the nuances of why
something is or isn’t offensive — government bureaucrats in particular. Over a decade ago, I
started what many have referred to as the world’s first and only all-Asian-American dance rock
band, the Slants. Our brand of 1980s-inspired synth pop was influenced by bands like Depeche
Mode, the Cure and New Order. We toured the country, promoting social justice, playing anime
conventions, raising money for charities and fighting stereotypes about Asian-Americans by
playing bold music. Never once, after performing hundreds of shows across the continent, did
we receive a single complaint from an Asian-American. In fact, our name became a catalyst for
meaningful discussions with non-Asians about racial stereotypes. During this time, our
attorney recommended that we register the trademark on our name, something that’s
commonly done for national acts. It’s a critical step in a music career, not only to protect fans
from inadvertently purchasing tickets to another band with a similar name but also because
most major record labels and licensing agencies won’t work with acts that can’t register their
names. However, in 2010, the government rejected our name, claiming it was, of all things,
disparaging to Asians. Alas, our sense of irony got lost in the paperwork. We had called
ourselves the Slants as a way of seizing control of a racial slur, turning it on its head and
draining its venom. It was also a respectful nod to Asian-American activists who had been
using the epithet for decades. But the Trademark Office didn’t buy it: It used sources like
UrbanDictionary.com, a photo of Miley Cyrus pulling her eyes back in a mocking gesture and
anonymous posts on internet message boards to “prove” that it was offensive. The decision
did not stop us from using the name. But we didn’t want to be defined by the Trademark Office.
So we took our case to court. For the past seven years, I’ve supplied thousands of pages of
evidence, including letters of support from prominent community leaders and organizations,
independent national surveys that showed that over 90 percent of Asian-Americans supported
our use of the name and an expert report from a co-editor at the New American Oxford
Dictionary. The Trademark Office fought back, calling our effort “laudable, but not influential.” In
a 2011 document, the office said, “It is uncontested that applicant is a founding member” of a
band “composed of members of Asian descent.” Then it pointed out the obvious Asian imagery
on our website, including photographs of Asian people and an album cover with a “stylized
dragon.” It was as if because we were Asian, because we were celebrating Asian-American
culture, we could not trademark the name the Slants. Yet “slant” is an everyday term — one
that has been registered as a trademark many times, primarily by white people. After we won
our case in a federal court, the Trademark Office asked the Supreme Court to review the case.
That very same week, the office granted another new registration for “slant” to a company
that makes industrial coils. I may be the only person denied a registration for “slant” because
it was deemed offensive to Asian-Americans. This week, the Supreme Court reversed the
Trademark Office’s decision, striking down the law that denied trademark protection to names
deemed derogatory. Some supporters of that law claim that offensive names will now routinely
receive trademark protection. (The Washington Redskins is a widely cited example.) But my
response is that the Trademark Office doesn’t have the cultural understanding to determine
what is or isn’t racist. Social theorists say that our identity can both be influenced by as well as
influence the world around us. Every scientific study confirms that the stigma of derogatory
terms like “queer” and “bitch” are mediated by perceived power when the referenced groups
own them. The role of the government shouldn’t include deciding how members of a group
define themselves. That right should belong to the community itself. The battles about hate
speech shouldn’t be waged at the Trademark Office, decided by those who have no
connections to our communities. Those skirmishes lead to arbitrary, inconsistent results and
slowly chip away at the dignity and agency of oppressed people to decide appropriateness on
our terms. A person’s quality of life, opportunities and rights may hinge on that person’s
identity. Those rights should not hinge on the hunch of a government employee armed with
wiki-joke websites. It’s suppression of speech in the most absurd manner. Americans need to
examine our systems of privilege and the ways unconscious bias affects our attitudes. But that
discussion begins with the freedom to choose our language. As we sing on “From the Heart” on
our latest album, “The Band Who Must Not Be Named”:
So sorry if you take offense

But silence will not make amends
The system’s all wrong
Reject
The alternative is to reject the aff – a negative ballot represents an act of
recognition and interrogation that is necessary to expose and uproot their
affirmation of a orientalist argument that once again puts the orient second.
the PRC,” pgs. 142-143, 2012)//DD
Why China, then? Let us begin by assuming the antagonisms
and epistemological challenges — such as
orientalism — that have subtended the China–West relationship for, say, three hundred years. Let us assume
these exist and that they have something to do with China in theory. (If nothing else, the entirety of the preceding pages has tried to
make this case.) So, too, let us recall that “our”
relationship to China is overwhelmingly an economic (and
political) one. China’s rise, its status as the “next” superpower, the manufacturer of the world,
the new Asian hegemon, the world-historical consumer market, the buyer of last resort for U.S.
dollars, the second largest economy – and so forth. This brute fact – the rise of China, the transformation of
the Sino–West “love–hate” relationship into one of greater “intimacy” – ultimately explains the existence of
Sinological-orientalism, and the necessity of its critique . It also helps us answer the question Why China? in a
materialist and historical way. Sinological-orientalism exists because it can. Orientalism, it should be recalled, is not simply about
stereotypical thinking, or some Self/Other dialectic of identities, or simply a prejudice or desire. It may partake of all of these,
surely, and we always have to allow for the place of imagination and the will-to-knowledge/ power. But in the end, orientalism
was and is about knowledge production and its distribution, the accumulation of information
about an area/Other for the purposes of control, management, administration, and profit financial as well as profit
symbolic.26 It is a material phenomenon, the production of a multifarious discourse that becomes
institutionalized and that is articulated to global political- economy and imperialism even as it
takes the form of intellectual and scholarly knowledge.27 Said famously argued that orientalism preceded and
prepared the ground for the modern colonial project. But this also needs to be understood dialectically : for without
the political–economic drive to control – the appropriation of land and labor, the overthrow of native regimes, primitive
accumulation and the accumulation of “primitives” – “orientalism” would only be a variant of Eurocentrism or simply chauvinist
scholarship. This is how our above theorists and the China field seem to understand the term. But that
will to, and
production of knowledge are still with us. Not to justify and administer colonialism, as in the
old days, but to get on with the business of business, as part of the global capitalist totality.
Subconscious orientalist pedagogy is the root cause of the Myth of the Model
Minority. The negative is a violent shaking to realize this pedagogical
framework, it cannot be foreclosed by any permutation.
A quick consideration of the many anti-Asian
stereotypes of today reveal their roots in the over-arching
Orientalism that still persists in the West’s conception of the East . We are the Perpetual Foreigner —
never quite normal, never quite “one of us”: this is a contemporary recapitulation of the Asian as the “Orientalized
Other”. Sexually, many of the gender stereotypes that were first invented during Marco Polo’s time — the hypersexualized lotus
blossoms and dragon ladies; the barbaric and cowardly effeminate men — still
thrive today. Even the Model Minority
myth has its roots in Orientalism : simultaneous awe of exotic Asian cultural traditions that emphasize academia with
fear of the intellectual Chinese Yellow Peril threat . Orientalism is frequently mistaken as being synonymous with
cultural appropriation and misappropriation because the fantasy of Orientalism has been constructed and reinforced through the
misappropriation of exaggerated Eastern cultural traits and practices to build and maintain the East as an exotic place of beauty and
terror. When Katy Perry goes all-out geisha, she is invoking and perpetuating the theatre of
Orientalism. When challenged, defenders of Orientalism will claim that this theatre is a “love declaration” (as Vincent Vidal
writes above), forgetting that these “love declarations” bear little resemblance to the culture from
which they are appropriated, and further removes the agency of the East to “represent itself, [thereby preventing] true
understanding”, as Said writes. Furthermore, Orientalism refers not just to the cultural appropriation, but
to the impact this appropriation has on our percepetion of Asia and Asian-ness . Orientalism is
more fundamentally the positioning of Asian people as the proverbial “Other”, always serving as a
counter-point to the normative West, forever an orbiting satellite, never able to define itself for itself within the Western cannon.
Orientalism eternally casts the Asian person as stereotype, and never allows the Asian body to
be “normal”.
Negative space
Only the exploration of negative space allows for a deconstruction of the new
habitations created by the settler colonist.
Song 15, Min Hyoung Song is Professor of English at Boston College, where he directs the Asian
American Studies Program. He is former editor of the Journal of Asian American Studies, and the
former director of the English MA program at BC. He received his PhD in English and American
Literature from Tufts University, and his AB in English and American Literature from The
University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Song is the author of two books, The Children of 1965: On
Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American (Duke, 2013) and Strange Future: Pessimism and
the 1992 Los Angeles Riots (Duke, 2005). He also co-edited The Cambridge History of Asian
American Literature (Cambridge, 2015) and Asian American Studies: A Reader (Rutgers, 2000).
The Children of 1965 won the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) Prize in Literary
Criticism, the Alpha Sigma Nu Award in Literature and Fine Arts, and was named Honorable
Mention for the Association for the Study of the Arts in the Present (ASAP) Book Prize. He has
published academic articles in the journals Mosaic, Twentieth-Century Literature, American
Literary History, LIT, and Legacy, and in numerous edited volumes of essays. He is currently
researching a new book project on race and ecology, and general co-editing a four-volume series
entitled “Asian American Literature in Transition” for Cambridge University Press. Strange
Future: Pessimism and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots (859-912)(SP)
It is important not to see the gradual transformation of rhetoric from nostalgic utopianism to
funeral decade as applying uniformly to all who live in this region. Because this utopianism
explicitly sought to create new, integrated, and fully rationalized habitations of housing, work,
and shopping for whites— repackaging a fictive past in the process to sell mostly Anglo
homebuyers on the desirability of suburban living and making “Los Angeles the most segregated
city in the country” by the mid-1960s (Fulton 1997, 10) — nonwhite Angelenos found
themselves occupying the negative spaces of the city to which planners and developers had not
yet turned their attention in the 1960s and 1970s. In Always Running, La Vida Loca: Gang Days in
L.A., Luis Rodriguez’s emotionally difficult memoir of his days as a member of a Chicano gang in
the Lomas neighborhood during these years, we are offered a vivid description of one of these
negative spaces: Unincorporated county territories were generally where the poorest people
lived, the old barrios, which for the most part didn’t belong to any city because nobody wanted
them. Most of Watts and East Los Angeles were unincorporated county territory. Sometimes
they had no sewage system, or paved roads…. In the mid-60s, South San Gabriel included both flat areas and what
we called the Hills, or Las Lomas…. The Hills were unseen. Cars flew past north of here on the San
Bernardino Freeway into Los Angeles, but most of the drivers never imagined such a place
existed, a place you could have found in the Ozarks or the hills of Tijuana. (1993, 38– 39) The negative spaces on a
developer’s map of Los Angeles did not recognize the existence of the communities that had formed in them, but rather, like
Rodriguez’s imagined drivers on the San Bernardino Freeway , ignored the presence of those who made a home
there and, without much thought, marked such places for future development. As the various
established communities were shaped, and major highways linked them to one another, a
process of infilling occurred in the later years that Always Running recounts. This process
continued to build the gridlike zones of habitation that defined the rationalized spaces of white
Los Angeles, and with the help of new capital from other places pushed those living in these
negative spaces into more rigidly defined and embanked communities of exclusion. “New tract
homes,” Rodriguez writes, “suddenly appeared on previously empty space or by displacing the
barrios. In later years, large numbers of Asians from Japan, Korea and Taiwan also moved into
the area…. The areas that weren’t incorporated, including Las Lomas , became self-contained
and forbidden, incubators of rebellion which the local media, generally controlled by suburban
whites, labeled havens of crime” (41). The developments rapidly altering the look of the city
during these decades both resembled suburban growth in the rest of the country and at the
same time represented a departure from the patterns that defined this growth. As Nayan Shah
points out, in San Francisco, a similar kind of segregation and containment of nonwhites
occurred earlier in the century, resulting in similar kinds of race relations: “The rationale of
nuisance law underwrote the cultural logic of residential covenants. In the upper-middle-class
residential developments, real estate developers defined the public good narrowly…. In contrast
to the mixed-use heterogeneity of older districts such as Chinatown, the new residential districts
sought to create a homogeneous, bucolic world by denying entrance to ‘undesirable neighbors’
and strictly controlling the appearance and type of buildings constructed” (2001, 72). Just as in
early twentieth-century San Francisco, Los Angeles was also constructed with the same “cultural
logic” of hygiene, rationalization, and control— the complexity of which we explored at some
length above in our discussion of Bradbury. The suburban developments that began to appear in
corporate boardrooms before the Second World War, modeled on what already existed in
Southern California, intentionally sought to re-create a pastoral ideal of standalone houses
sitting on top of perfectly defined green rectangles, outfitted with the latest conveniences in
home technology, each street and row of houses resembling the next, with cosmetic variations
in height and facade, all of which were constructed along ruler-straight lines that curlicued into
pointless cul-de-sacs and were emptied of those who might taint this ideal. Suburban
developers were literally answering the call to start over by tearing down old neighborhoods
and decimating fragile ecosystems in the relentless pursuit of an ideal. The difference, however,
between a place such as San Francisco and Los Angeles is that the former had a long-established
downtown area while postwar Los Angeles began with a suburban ideal in mind. This means
that for developers in San Francisco, rationalization entailed the expulsion of older, less
maintained, nonwhite communities from the city’s borders (as successive but failed attempts
by politicians and labor unions to remove Chinatown from San Francisco’s city borders
suggest) and the growth of suburban developments outward in concentric circles from the newly rehabilitated center.
Distortion
Our only option is to engage in a framework of radical distortion.
Marandi, 2009 (Seyed, Tehran University North American Studies Department Head ,
Western Media Representations, Iran, and Orientalist Stereotypes, January 2009,
http://conflictsforum.org/briefings/western-media-representations.pdf, pg. 2-8)
Orientalism describes the various schools of thought and methods of investigation through
which Europe came to know ‘the East.’ According to scholars such as Edward Said, it was and still is through this
discourse and its construction of knowledge that the West has been able to legitimize and maintain its hold over the uncivilized
‘Other.’ A
major and repeated feature of Oriental analysis in all its various forms is that it constantly
confirms the thesis that the Orient is primitive, mysterious, exotic, and incapable of
selfgovernment. However, orientalism should not be looked upon as just the rationalization of colonial rule. Far more
important, it seems, is how it knowingly or unknowingly justifies imperialism and colonialism even in advance of their actual
manifestation. Orientalism can be “viewed in Foucauldian terms as a discourse: a manifestation of
power/knowledge.”1 This is because, as Foucault sees it, discourse is a severely bounded area of social
knowledge or “heavily policed cognitive systems which control and delimit both the mode and the means of representation in a
given society.”2 It is a series of statements, through which the world can be known, as it is not recognized by simply analyzing
objective data. Its recognition is brought into being through discourse, which is ideologically loaded, but independent of individual
discourse is the system of thought by which dominant powers
will and judgment. According to Said,
establish spheres of ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth’, and it is through such discursive practices that religions, races,
cultures, and classes are represented. Discursive practices are interwoven with social and power relations, while history itself is
indivisible from discursive formations. The idea of representation is usually based upon a notion of being faithful to the original.
However, representation is largely interwoven with many other things besides ‘truth’. It is defined not just by inherent common
subject matter, but also by a common history, tradition, and universe of discourse that exists within a particular field.3
Representation is a phenomenon created by writers, intellectuals, artists, commentators, reporters, travelers, politicians, as well as
others working within similar discursive formations. This Foucauldian perspective permits Said to consider numerous ‘Western’
texts, from apparently separate intellectual disciplines such as politics, media, history, linguistics, and literature, among others, as
What brings these texts together is the common culture
belonging to a single discourse called Orientalism
and ideology intrinsic to the discursive practices through which they produce knowledge
about the Orient.. These discursive “practices make it difficult for individuals to think outside them – hence they are also seen
as exercises of power and control”.4 However, it should be kept in mind that this does not mean that a discourse is either static or
cannot admit internal contradictions. It is often the case that orientalist modes of thought and representation are actually able to
survive contact with the reality on the ground with which it often seems to be at odds with. One reason for this may be that the
need for creating an overall consistency in discourse may constantly prevent the realization of objective analysis as well as
commitment to ‘truth’.The stronger the discourse becomes the longer it lives, and the better it is
able to bring about consistency within its borders. This is helped through the continued
repetition and adaptation of its motifs. Another explanation for the persistent Orientalist mode
of representation is Said’s concept of latent and manifest Orientalism. Manifest Orientalism is
basically comprised of openly stated ideas about Eastern civilization, history, government, or
literature produced at different historical junctures. Latent Orientalism, however, is an “almost
unconscious and certainly an untouchable positivity”5 that: […] contains the basic ‘truths’ of the
Orient, so that while, for example historians might disagree about particular interpretations of
the history of the Orient, underlying assumptions of oriental backwardness would remain
unquestioned. As such latent Orientalism has strong affinities with certain concepts of
ideology, particularly the ‘negative’ version of ideology as false consciousness, and the durability of ideological formations,
especially when allied to strong institutions such as Orientalism, would also help to explain the survival of Orientalist attitudes.6 An
important aspect of Said’s Orientalism is that it explains the methods through which ‘the Other’ was constructed by the West as its
barbaric, irrational, despotic, and inferior opposite or alter ego. It is a type of surrogate and underground version of the West or the
‘self’.7 What may be even more significant is that through its position of domination, the West is even able to tell the ‘truth’ to non-
Western cultures, in this case the Orient, about their past and present condition, as they are capable of representing the Orient
more authentically than the Orient can itself. Such a ‘truthful’
representation not only aids the colonizer or
imperialist in justifying their actions, but it also serves to weaken the resistance of ‘the Other’
as it changes the way in which ‘the Other’ views itself. Many western experts, historians, reporters, and
analysts may not necessarily construct an intentionally misleading or dishonest image of the Other (though some do). Many may not
even omit facts, which by doing so might lead readers or viewers to unacceptable conclusions (though many do). What often
happens is that the truth is quickly mentioned and then the analyst focuses on other issues. In other words, facts are sometimes
stated and then buried in a mass of other information, and at times misinformation. The issue at stake here is not about
simplification or emphasis, which are both inevitable for reporters and experts alike. The
subsequent distortions are
perhaps at times necessary in order for a wider audience to understand the topic under
discussion. The form of distortion that is of concern here is an ideological one rather than a
technical one, where intentionally or otherwise, any chosen emphasis effectively backs some kind of interest. The distortion
may not be intentional, because the expert or analyst, whether western or a westernized oriental, has been trained under the
illusion that knowledge and education are essentially neutral and are not tools that can be used for contending centers of power,
nations, or races. Hence, by emphasizing certain elements and deemphasizing others (if they are at all presented), at times major
crimes and even mass murder can be justified. This can easily been seen in the discourse of the mainstream media in the ‘West’
regarding western support for Saddam Hussain’s brutal regime as well as it’s use of weapons of mass destruction against Iranian and
Iraqi civilians and combatants. The same can be said about the western media’s relative silence and indifference towards the Zionist
regime’s barbaric siege of the Gaza Strip. Such crimes
against humanity are regularly accepted as appalling,
yet somehow necessary in order to protect the interests of the so-called Free World. The media’s
treatment of western governments, politicians, and other western or westernized figures of influence in comparison to that of their
victims or antagonists, whether they are Iranian politicians, Afghani villagers, or hungry Palestinian children, is regularly influenced
by ‘national interests’ and the interests of the ‘free world’. In other words, the mainstream media takes for granted that western
actions are a necessary evil to ward off a greater evil. Hence, history and the present is told from the point of view of western
governments, conquerors, and diplomats, because they deserve universal acceptance in the face of the uncivilized Other.
Mockery
Our affirmative is a violent mockery of the affirmative, distorting the coherence
of the assumed power relationships.
Kim ’09 (Chang-Hee Kim, The Fantasy of Asian America: Identity, Ideology, and Desire) klmd
Hwang’s M. Butterfly distorts and mocks the East and the West power relationship that Puccini’s opera
registers through the gendered tropes of race in the colonial context. The play has the stage set up as a closed society of the
totalitarian China ruled by the strict communist regime where a strong sense of Sino-nationalism against Western influence is
demanded from the people. It contextualizes the stage in a contemporary world where the West is
still considered masculine and the East feminine, and the latter tries to fight back the inherent
colonial legacy. Film critic Richard Fung’s essay in 1991 titled “Looking for My Penis” shows how modern Asian American
manhood is still “exoticized, feminized, and made invisible” (107).31 In this regard, the stage displays a kind of limbo
space where not only do anti-cultural imperialism and anti-Orientalism cross each other, but
the ideological normalcy against homosexuality and miscegenation is still dominant. Against this
backdrop, the French diplomat Gallimard falls in love with the transvestite Chinese diva Song who masquerades as Madame
Butterfly. The Western “foreign devil” falsely recognizes him as woman and keeps his homosexual relationship with the Chinese spy
in Oriental drag for twenty years. When indicted for espionage activities, Gallimard denies in court the real identity of Song as male.
In the face of Song’s being naked, however, Gallimard “plunges the knife into his body” while wearing a 31 Quoted in Anne A.
Cheng’s The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001): 107. 77 Butterfly kimono
in jail. Different from the ending of Puccini’s opera, Song in this play shouts “Butterfly,” but in a questioning tone: “Butterfly?
Butterfly?” I read Song’s reiteration of “Butterfly?” as a symptom that resists the confirmation of the iconic abstraction of Madame
Butterfly as the colonial emblem of feminine sexuality. Song’s exclamation followed by a question mark implies that an ideological
interpellation toward Song winds up incomplete as well as impossible. This failed signifier of ontological abstraction results from
calling Song the iconic figure of colonial fantasy and turns on Gallimard being his own object of fantasy, an absurd means of
representing Butterfly in terms of race, gender, and sexuality. Namely, Gallimard identifies himself with the fetishistic object of his
own fantasy. In such a way, Hwang’s postcolonial project twists and mocks the colonial fantasy as he
mentions via Song’s voice in M. Butterfly—i. e., “the submissive Oriental woman and the cruel white man”
(17). In a similar vein, David Eng observes in his Racial Castration that M. Butterfly comments on the symbolic order of hegemonic
ideology that prohibits homosexuality and downplays ethnic identities of people of color in favor of white heterosexuality. He
continues, “Unable to occupy the position of the domineering European imperialist following Song’s morphological unveiling,
Gallimard is so invested in heterosexuality and whiteness that he ultimately elects to occupy the position of the ‘other’” (142-3).
The perverted inversion of Gallimard’s sexual and racial position into Song’s one portrays white
heterosexual masculinity as not so much essential as constituted by, as he puts it, “fetishistic
application” (143). From his viewpoint, Gallimard’s suicide is due to his ‘impotence’ of being unable to live up to his given racial
and sexual identity which underpins his colonial authority. Concerning the transformative sexual and racial identity of Gallimard who
ends up dead in Butterfly’s kimono and wig, Eng makes an interesting point. He juxtaposes with the so-called phallus his passing into
his own object of fantasy. Citing Mark Chiang, he suggests that Gallimard’s fetishistic application to heterosexual masculinity
necessarily demands his 78 masculine identity with the phallus, namely, his having the phallus. If the phallus refers to the symbolic
discourse of strong masculinity as metaphorically implied in the anatomical organ of the penis, Eng’s idea sounds fair. In this case,
both phallus and penis are considered a fetishistic object and property indispensible for possibly having masculinity. He goes further
to say Gallimard’s transformation into a white-masked homosexual Oriental allows him not to have it but to “be the phallus” (164).
Namely, his metamorphosis as a homosexual transvestite indicates his libidinal investment in colonial fantasy which runs amuck
identifying himself with the colonial emblem of feminine sexuality, which drives him not so much to have as to be the penis.
Gallimard’s ontological alteration into being the phallus from having it, Eng contends, manifests his homosexual relationship with
the French ambassador Toulon, and witnesses their representational crisis of heterosexual subjectivity, the hegemonic norm of the
West. This collapse of the having/being distinction renders exposed the hidden ideology of
heterosexual normativity, which actually originates from homosexual impulses. According to Eng,
therefore, the ideological normalization of heterosexual whiteness perversely masks the white
male’s fetishistic desire for the phallus qua the indexical signifier of homosexuality: not only
femininity but masculinity also becomes a highly fetishized object.
Radical Disarmament
We close the ideological gap, the negative is the trojan horse that seeks to
wreck havoc unto the cohered ideology of the affirmative.
Wang 13 Dorothy J. Wang is an Associate Professor in the American Studies Program at
Williams College. Winner of the 2016 Best Book in Literary Criticism Award, sponsored by the
Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS).Honorable Mention in the 2014 Pegasus Award
for Poetry Criticism, sponsored by the Poetry Foundation. Thinking Its Presence Form, Race, and
Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry 219-227 SP
The gure of Genghis Chan embodies the con ation of two “Orien- tal” characters that gure in the American popular imaginary: Char-
lie Chan and Genghis Khan. As is so with other racial minorities, stereotypes of Asian Americans tend to be
categorized along gender lines into two crude types: in the case of men, the “good,” submis-
sive Oriental (Charlie Chan, the houseboy) and the “evil” Oriental, represented by the barbaric
invader (Genghis Khan) or the sinisterly devious despot (Fu Manchu) or a combination of the
two (Ming the Merciless).30 Whether “good” or “evil,” all Orientals are viewed as equally
“inscrutable.” Like his detective namesake, Yau’s Genghis Chan works as a private eye. Through the Genghis Chan poems,
rYau parodies numerous discourses that have written both himself and other Chinese (Asian)
Americans: the mainstream media’s racist/Orientalist rendering of “Orientals,” the rhetoric of
detective novels and lm noir, ridicul- ing renditions of the “broken English” of early Chinese
immigrants, clichéd homespun American maxims, and Orientalized poetic foms (most notably
the haiku). Many of these discourses are themselves parasitic; for example, the character of
Charlie Chan—created by the Ohioan novelist Earl Derr Biggers, based on an actual Chinese
Amer- ican detective in Honolulu and portrayed by three different white actors in forty-seven
Hollywood lms31—constitutes a grotesque caricature, intended or not, of “Oriental”
behavior. Biggers created the character of Charlie Chan after vacationing in Hawaii, where he read about a Chinese American
detective in Hono- lulu named Chang Apana. Chan makes his rst cinematic appearance in 1926, played by an Asian American actor,
George Kuwa, in a small role in House Without a Key, but not until 1931, when Charlie Chan gets his own movie and is played by
Warner Oland in yellow- face (Sidney Toler takes over the role in 1938), does he really take off as a cinematic phenomenon,
becoming permanently ingrained in the American psyche. The last Charlie Chan movie was released in 1949, not coincidentally the
year that the United States “lost” China, and, in the American political imaginary, the little Asian “buddy” and World War II ally
turned into a Red Communist threat. Also noncoincidental was the casting of Eastern European actors who had been primarily
known for their horror- lm roles—Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney, Peter Lorre—as “Orientals” in Charlie Chan and other early
Hollywood lms depicting Asians (such as Shadows [1922], The Mask of Fu Manchu [1932], Shadow of Chinatown [1936], and Mr.
Wong, Detective [1938]).32 Many of these actors relied on regular gigs playing these characters (Peter Lorre as Mr. Moto, for one) to
make a living; at the same time, Asian Ameri- can actors’ careers and personal lives often ended tragically as a result of Hollywood’s
demeaning and exploitative use of them (for example, Anna May Wong).33 Whether evil or “good,” these Oriental
characters always spoke broken English and were viewed as unredeemably alien. They were
parodies themselves of some “Oriental” essence and culture : “I come from a China no Chinese
from China comes from,” says the Chinese American narrator who plays Charlie Chan’s son in
Frank Chin’s story “Sons of Chan” (154). In Hollywood, Asian culture and customs were made
ridiculous, sinister, and always inhuman. Needless to say, Asian Americans were never depicted
as “regular Americans”—or as Americans at all, even if their roots in the United States went
back to the mid-nineteenth century, as was not uncom- mon in California (Anna May Wong,
born in 1905 in Los Angeles, was herself a third-generation American).34 Since Hollywood
characterizations were the only widely disseminated depictions of Asians available to Asian
Americans growing up in the United States, it is not an understatement to say that their sense of
identity, ethnic and American and ethnic American, were formed to a great extent by these
distorted mirrors on-screen. As the narrator in Chin’s “Sons of Chan” puts it, “God kicked Earl
Derr Biggers in the head and commanded him to give us Chinamans [sic] a son, in almost His
image. And Charlie Chan was born. And, in a sense, so was I. . . . I had a white man for a father”
(132). (“Father” signi es a family patriarch but also God, the logos, the Word.) Yau told me dur-
ing an interview that when he was around seven, his parents left him at the movies to watch
double features instead of getting a babysitter; thus, in a real sense, he, too, was formed by the
movies. In contrast to the aphorism-spouting, effeminate, and subservi- ent Charlie Chan—“led
by a white man, speak[ing] with a broken tongue, and . . . docile and polite to a fault”35—
another detective g- ure was emerging in American lm: that of the (white) tough-guy private eye
in lm noir, inspired by the detective ction of such writers as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell
Hammett. This character was a taciturn, masculine loner, played in the movies by actors such as
Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum (one of Yau’s favorites and whose laconic manner Yau’s
somewhat resembles). It is these two traditions—Orientalist/racist Hollywood depictions of
the “Chinese,” and the tough-guy American genres of detective ction and lm noir—that coalesce
in the gure of Genghis Chan (whose rst name evokes yellow-peril fantasies of invading,
marauding “Asiatics”). The absurd con ation of Genghis Chan and Charlie Chan signals obvious
parodic intent to the reader—or should. The rst seven poems in the “Genghis Chan: Private
Eye” (hereaf- ter, “GC”) series appear in Radiant Silhouette: New and Selected Work: 1974–
1988. What is being parodied in these poems is not so much dis- crete, speci c, and localized
“target texts” but amorphous and omnipresent popular discourses. In some cases, Yau
parodies what are themselves already parodies (that is, parodies of “Asian” mannerisms and
speech). The all-pervasiveness and diffuseness of these discourses make it dif cult for the Asian
American poet to ght them. Parody provides one means of bringing close (or closer) these
overweaning ideologies, which manifest themselves in language, in an attempt to deconstruct
and disarm them. In his genealogical account of the novel in “Prehistory,” Bakhtin focuses on two factors—“one . . .
laughter, the other polyglossia”—in the prehistory of novelistic discourse (original italics; 50). Laughter, as a root of parody, is
important not just for its comic elements but also for its subversive ones, as Bakhtin delineates in his essay “Epic and Novel: Toward
a Methodology for the Study of the Novel”: It is precisely laughter that . . . in general destroys any hierarchical (distancing and
valorized) distance. . . . Laughter
has the remarkable power of making an object come up close, of
drawing it into a zone of crude contact where one can nger it familiarly on all sides, turn it
upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and below, break open its external shell, look
into its center, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely
and experi- ment with it. Laughter demolishes fear and piety before an object, before a world,
. . . thus clearing the ground for an absolutely free investigation of it.36 Parody provides the
“zone of crude contact” by literally internalizing the words of the dominant discourses in
much the same way that minority Americans have internalized mainstream myths, stereo-
types, and ideologies. Bakhtin explains that the first step toward liberating “one’s own
discourse and one’s own voice . . . from the authority of the other’s discourse” is first to
assimilate that other discourse so that it is “tightly interwoven with ‘one’s own word,’” to
“experience it physically as an object.”37
Framework Cards
Voting aff leads to serial policy failure where we blindly promote policies
without recognizing their inevitable demise
Said 78 (Edward, father of orientalism and post-colonialism “Orientalism: Western
Conceptions of the World”, 3/5/78, http://www.rlwclarke.net/courses/LITS3304/2010-
2011/13Said,Orientalism.pdf) RR Jr
a textual attitude, but a student of literature will
It may appear strange to speak about something or someone as holding
understand the phrase more easily if he will recall the kind of view attacked by Voltaire in Candide, or even the attitude to reality satirized by
Cervantes in Don Quixote. What seems unexceptionable good sense to these writers is that it is a fallacy to assume that the
swarming, unpredictable, and problematic mess in which human beings live can be understood
on the basis of what books texts say; to apply what one learns out of a book literally to reality is
to risk folly or ruin. One would no more think of using Amadis of Gaul to understand sixteenth century (or present¬ day) Spain than one would use the Bible to
understand, say, the House of Commons. But clearly people have tried and do try to use texts in so simple-minded
a way, for otherwise Candide and Don Quixote would not still have the appeal for readers that
they do today. It seems a common human failing to prefer the schematic authority of a text to
the disorientations of direct encounters with the human. But is this failing constantly present, or
are there circumstances that, more than others, make the t extual attitude likely to prevail?
The public plays an implicit, deciding role in determining whether or not

artificially imposed identities can be put in place, public approval justifies forms
of irrational and unwarranted aggression
Hayes 12, Assistant Professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, Jarrod Hayes
received his PhD in Politics and International Relations from the University of Southern
California in 2009. From 2009 to 2010, he was the ConocoPhillips Assistant Professor of
International Relations at the University of Oklahoma, a joint appointment between the
Department of Political Science and the School of International and Area Studies. He has taught
courses on International Relations theory, comparative national security, and international
security. His research interests fit most neatly into the areas of international security and foreign
policy analysis. International Organization, Vol. 66, No. 1 (Winter 2012), pp. 63-93
(Securitization, Social Identity, and Democratic Security: Nixon, India, and the Ties That Bind)
http://www.jstor.org/stable/41428946 jl
These dynamics play out in discourses over foreign policy. Policies
involving negotiation and reconciliation -
democratic political behavior - are
justified by appealing to democratic norms and identity . Leaders
emphasize that the external state warrants these approaches as a trustworthy member of the
democratic community, that these behaviors are expected in return, and that the situation can be
approached without concerns over violence. Policies involving aggression and violence - nondemocratic
political behavior - are justified by demonstrating that the target state is beyond reason or
trust, and that their behavior could result in violence against the home state (an existential threat).
Political leaders achieve this aim by emphasizing the undemocratic identity and unwillingness
to reliably operate by democratic norms of the other . The securitized state poses an existential threat
because it is dissimilar from the democratic self, defined in part by the exclusion of violence from conflict resolution amongst the
ingroup. In the event of disputed securitization, political actors are expected to contest the categoriza- tion of the external state in
Democratic identity occupies a privileged position in threat
an effort to garner audience support.36
construction in part because it provides the political sphere's behavioral expectations ,
including the resolution of conflicts of interest , in a way that other identities in the political context do not. Since
the democratic peace highlights the absence of war - and war is a political act37 - any effort to understand security relations
between democracies must account for factors like political identity that shape domestic politics. This does not mean democratic
identity is all-powerful. Other identities may come into play in the securitization move. The argument here is that democratic
identity plays a particularly central and important role in democratic security construction. Democratic identity does not dictate that
we must like our fellow democrats,38 or that democracies should make war against nondemocracies .In the case of shared
democracy, however, it does make the existential threat element of the securitization move
extremely difficult. The securitization dynamic is not unique to democracies. What is unique is the primary audience. In a
democracy, the public plays a critical role in major foreign policy decisions like war. It is
inherent to the nature of democratic governance: leaders are accountable to the public for
their policy decisions. Consequently, it is to the dominant (democratic) identity of the public and the attendant set of norms
that leaders in democracies must appeal to securitize an external state. In democracies, we would expect contestation over
securitization moves to occur within the elite, but the primary audience (and adjudicator) of this contestation is the public .
The
role of the public as securitization audience is one of the critically defining elements of
democracy. Leaders in autocracies face a different audience: the policymaking elite. Political structure, identity, and norms are
far more personalistic, indicated by small selectorates and hierarchical political structures.39 The governing identity (s) and the
interests of the state are grounded in the particulars of the ruling group.
Scenario planning is an attempt to control all possible futures that is only a

privilege afforded to international stakeholders
Petrick 15 (Kamilla, PhD in Political Science from York University, “Strategic Planning in the
‘Empire of Speed’”, Globalizations, 2015 (June 26))
In this political-economic and cultural milieu, then, existenceis increasingly ‘marked by high rates of change
and oriented to short-run time horizons’ (Rosa, 2013, p. 138). The need for instantaneous responses
permitted by ever-expanding, instantaneous and increasingly inescapable communication technologies means that, as John Urry
put it, echoing Nowotny, ‘the future dissolves into an extended present’ (2009, p. 191). As a result, the future
has largely ceased to be a controllable dimension in our collective consciousness . The profound and
disturbing implications of this temporal contraction for individual and organizational capacity to think and plan long term have not
escaped Rosa’s analysis. As he notes in his recent book, the need for planning in late modernity increases to the same extent that
the range of what can be planned decreases. As a result, fewer and fewer things can be provided with
regulations once and for all or at least for the period of one or more generations; the limit of the foreseeable moves
steadily closer to the present, and politics has to shift over to a mode of muddling through where the
urgency of the fixed-term reigns and temporary and provisional solutions take the place of
larger political designs. (2013, p. 264) What has been society’s reaction to the hectic pace of life, perpetual state of
uncertainty and pervasive sense of futurelessness? As Susie O’Brien elucidates in this issue, the response of industry,
government and other organizations has been to embrace the practice of scenario planning.
However, the fashion in which organizations go about this practice has little to do with radical
efforts to reimagine and prefigure a more equitable world: instead, they are more properly
understood as constitutive of imperialist capitalist temporality and related attempts to assert
control over all possible futures. Moreover, as O’Brien’s contribution makes clear, community stakeholders
and social movements tend to be shut out from such planning sessions . Where does this leave
contemporary oppositional social movements like the alter-globalization movement? How are their efforts to create a brighter,
more just and equitable future for all affected by the pervasive short-termism and the sense of futurelessness? A brief glance at
today’s anti-status quo political terrain makes one wont to wonder, following Turpey (2001), whatever happened to those early
twentieth-century expressions of optimism in the socialist future trumpeted in the Italian socialists’ Avanti! or the German Social
Democrats’ Vorwa ̈rts—and where do we find their analogues today?

K - Orientalism

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

K - Orientalism

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Orientalism/Alien Capital K

Solomon Park(class of 2019)

John Lubiantesky (class of 2020)

Barstow PW & Barstow LM

Orientalism translates into domestic spatial management within ‘ethnic

Orientalism fuels the exploitation of Alien labor by creating distinct

Shocks cause cooperation – your discourse causes escalation

Chinese threat construction is a fabrication used to protect Western identity

Consequently, almost by default, China emerges as an absolute

) The upshot, therefore, is that since China displays no absolute certainty

By now, it seems clear that neither

The aff’s discourse on technology, capitalism and knowledge enforces the

countries of the Orient are believed to be underdeveloped in

The Captive Mind is provincial in the sense that it is

Notions of a violent Afghan ‘Other’ persist in Anglo-American political thought about

Reps key in the context of counterterrorism

In sum, it is almost impossible to measure arithmetically the outcome of counterterrorism efforts .

The Knowledge Apparatus of Western Thinking is The Root Cause of Middle

Representations of North Korea are rooted in ideological hegemony not

I want now to move on to the third and final reorientation in

Your concept of nomads fetishizes non-western knowledge forms and assumes

Orientalism replicates colonialist tactics – causes western intervention and

Oreintailist discourse leads to racist violence.

Many Southeast Asian American students may be English

Cambodian American, Laotian American, African American, and Vietnamese American

**edited for ableist language

So sorry if you take offense

The public plays an implicit, deciding role in determining whether or not

Scenario planning is an attempt to control all possible futures that is only a

You might also like