Tournament Schedule

Schedule – open Tourney 

Wednesday
Round 1 – 9:30am
Round 2 – 1:10pm
Round 3 – 3:00pm
Round 4 – 7:15pm

Thursday
Round 5 – 10:15am
Round 6 – 1:30pm
Octas – 7:15pm

Friday
Quarters – 10:00am
Semis – 2:30pm
Finals – 7:00pm

Rooms for Week 3

its the final countdown...

Monday 7/21

Morning BLB 40
Afternoon BLB 255
Evening MYSTERY

Tuesday 7/22

Morning BLB 40
Afternoon BLB 40
Evening BLB 40

Wednesday 7/23

Morning
Afternoon WH 213
Evening

Thursday 7/24

Morning AUDB 201
Afternoon BLB 35
Evening

Friday 7/25

Morning LANG 210
Afternoon BLB 40
Evening

save your flows!

Hope the debates went well and we learned a lot today! Remember to save your flows and bring them to evening lab tomorrow so we can have some rebuttal redos.
Meet in blb 80 tomorrow at 2:55 for attendance for the second set of electives.

Inter-lab Debate Schedule - Saturday 7/19

Saturday – 1:15pm - all rooms in BLB

Room 65
Chiara/Martin (AFF) v.  Shaneeda
Judge – Gabe

Room 70
Courtney/Hayden (AFF) v. Princess Warrior Spirit
Judge – Sydney

Room 73
Sanjana/Gustavo (AFF) v. Triple C
Judge – Quinn

Room 75
Turner/Pryia (AFF) v. Surf Bros
Judge – Josh

Room 80
Jia/Michelle (Aff) v. No Name
Judge – Andy

Room 90
Krishna/Ally (AFF) v. Ali/Joseph
Judge – Hope

Team Room 1
Brian/Riley (AFF) v. Casey/Kayla
Judge – Louie

Saturday – 3:15pm - All Rooms in BLB

Room 65
Princess Warrior Spirit v. Chiara/Martin
Judge – Iggy

Room 70
Shaneeda v. Courtney/Hayden
Judge – Andy

Room 73
Surf Bros (AFF) v. Sanjana/Gustavo
Judge – Quinn

Room 75
Triple C v. Turner/Pryia
Judge – Ryan

Room 80
Ali/Joseph (AFF) v. Jia/Michelle
Judge – Gabe

Room 90
Casey/Kayla (AFF) v. Krishna/Ally
Judge – Roark

Team Room 1
No Name (AFF) v. Brian/Riley
Judge – Hope

Saturday – 7:00pm - All Rooms in BLB


Room 65
Shaneeda (AFF) v. Chiara/Martin
Judge – Roark

Room 70
Princess Warrior Spirit (AFF) v. Courtney/Hayden
Judge – Hunter

Room 73
Triple C (AFF) v. Sanjana/Gustavo
Judge –  Hope

Room 75
Surf Bros (AFF) v. Brian/Turner
Judge – Sydney

Room 80
No Name (Aff) v. Jia/Michelle
Judge – Ryan

Room 90
Riley/Ali (AFF) v. Casey/Kayla
Judge – Iggy

Weekend Elective Schedule

Here is the schedule for weekend electives - you get to pick one elective from each section to attend.

Saturday 9:55AM 

Meet in BLB 80 to take attendance

Elective Set 1 – 10:10-11:00am 

Shelby Pryor – Room 65

Topicality - A Standards Debate
Impact comparison between the standards on Topicality. Topicality like a disad. 

Collin Roark – Room 70

Winning with Politics and Midterms
Learn the key fundamentals about researching, preparing, and winning the politics disadvantage etc.

Ryan Wash – Room 73

"Debate as a homeplace: Quaring Deliberative Democracy"
This elective will clarify my understanding of debate as home and discuss the difference between a fight for inclusion and a fight against an ethic of exclusion.

Brian Kersch – Room 75

The “WARMEST” Impact, One impact to rule them all. – Learn how to debate warming impacts both generically and in comparison to other impact claims. Louie wants me to call this "the WARMEST impact"

Bryan Gaston – Room 80

The Film Room
This elective is designed to explore how to film your debates and use those films to improves your skills and make you a better debater.  Its not just for football anymore film studies in debate will increase your speaker points and its one the best ways to view and correct bad habits.

Andy Casey – Room 90

Indigenous Peoples and the Ocean
I will discuss indigenous peoples and possible affirmative and negative ideas for the topic. this will include brief history reviews.

Elective Set 2 – 11:15-12:05pm 

Toby Whisenhunt – Room 140

A Cap K Hack's Secrets Revealed –
Capitalism is complicated, but the Cap K is not.  Learn about some classic cards, authors, terms, and tricks found in debate rounds not the pesky real world.  Also talking about how to bum out Cap K teams.  The Cap K can be 3 cards and a cloud of dust.  Nothing fancy here.

Eric Robinson – Room 65

Cross-X
This lecture focuses on how to improve your win totals and speaker points via cross-x. Strategies for asking and answering questions will be discussed with various examples and drill suggestions given.

Iggy Evans – Room 70

Cultural CPs
modes of competition(textual, cultural, political conclusion, pedagogical purpose [ motives])- the different levels, creative DA's(whiteness DA's, anti- da, language) or different k's as DA for a performative cp, c(p) (counter performance ), counter advocacy- ie snitching bad / opacity  good, interest convergent args become da's for consult Blk ppl cp

Gabe Murillo – Room 90

*Deploying the K*
How to extend the K and amplify its strategic value.

Sydney Pasquinelli – Room 75

Aesthetics
I will be discussing some basic aesthetic theory.  I will then be applying that theory to practice in a debate round. Eg how to weigh aesthetics against extinction impacts or ethics impacts.

Colin Quinn – Room 73

The 1N: how to be the best position in debate
A lecture about what to do as the 1n before/during/after the debate.

Josh Gonzlaez – Room 80

Metaphysics
Yeah, so a traditional branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world that encompasses it, so let’s answer TWO questions – 1) What is ultimately there?, and 2) What is it like?

Sunday 3:00pm 

Meet at 2:55 in BLB 80 to take attendance

Elective Set 3 – 3:10-4:00pm 

Collin Roark – Room  65

Negative terrorism
Lecture on way to crush the affirmative throughout the season. because they ain't got no humanity. topics covered: concept of 'playbook', 1NC construction, advanced block strategy, 2NR decision-making, closing doors, when to run & gun etc.

Iggy Evans – Room 70

Remixing
It is a method lecture that seeks to show how negs create creative counter advocy using song and metaphor. Sampling as process  that is educational, music as the starting point for political project , examples of themes as political

Brian Kersch – Room 73

Constructing an effective 2ac to the K
Learn how to not only order and construct a proper 2ac to the K, also learn which arguments make the 2nr nearly impossible in a K debate. I will also teach you the ins and outs of the tricks negative teams use to try and cheat their way into a negative ballot.

Shelby Pryor – Room 75

Aff Strategic Choices
Different types of 1acs and their pros/cons and aff tips and tricks for each speech.

Andy Casey – Room 90

Winning at a Small School
Managing resources: how to successfully compete at a small school without having much access to coaching or card cutting.

Toby Whisenhunt – Room 140

Now what? What to do after camp to prepare for the season.
We will look at some important resources you can access and talk about the best way to utilize those resources throughout the year.

Sydeny Pasquinelli – Room 80

Femininity in debate
This will be a follow up discussion to the lecture I gave thursday. I am requesting that *only girls* attend this session (any person who identifies as a girl).

Elective Set 4 – 4:10 – 5:00pm 

Max Anderson – Room 65

"The Crazies" 
A discussion of the arguments you love to hate.  Discussion will include, Wipeout, ASHTAR, and Aliens.

Gabe Murillo – Room 90

*Beating Framework*
How to deploy your affirmative and craft the most effective response to framework arguments.

Colin Quinn – Room 70

Debating liberalism
Why great power war won't happen and why disads don't make sense.
About how to debate with a no war contention.

Bryan Gaston – Room73

It's Go Time-How to Prepare for Tournaments
This elective is designed to teach you steps you should take to prepare for specific tournaments during your debate season.  We will cover strategic planning choices, how to scout, and use online resources to your advantage.

Ryan Wash – Room  75

"Mastering the Light Arts: Using debate to beat debate"
This elective is designed to highlight some of the dangers of arguments being deployed in debate and also how side burdens can help and/or hurt a particular argument. I will also highlight ways that more traditional teams use debate to beat critical teams.

Eric Robinson – Room  80

Aff Prep
This lecture focuses on summer strategizing and the considerations that go into picking an affirmative topic area, picking a specific aff, writing a plan, picking advantages, and writing frontlines.

Practice Rounds - 7/15

WOOTEN HALL Y'ALL 

ROOM           AFF               NEG             JUDGE

118                 C                    Double C        Ryan

121                 No Name        PWS              Iggie

122                 Surf Bros         Shaneeda      Gabe


START AT 7:00

Week 1 is Over!

We finished our first week of the Mean Green K Lab! Let us know what you learned and what we can improve on!

Rooms for Week 2

Monday 7/14

Morning SAGE 330
Afternoon SAGE 116
Evening BLB 180

Tuesday 7/15

Morning BLB 180
Afternoon BLB 80
Evening   Practice debates
Wooten Hall 118 121 122

Wednesday 7/16

Morning BLB 245
Afternoon BLB 170
Evening ESSC 255

Thursday 7/17

Morning CURY 203
Afternoon SAGE 230
Evening         BLB 180

Friday 7/18

Morning CURY 110
Afternoon BLB 80
Evening BLB 50

Saturday 7/19

Morning BLB 140
Afternoon Debate BLB 90
Evening BLB 140

Sunday 7/20

Afternoon BLB 80
Evening BLB 140

Example 1NC

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?

Why are you beset with gloom?

‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells

Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,

With the certainty of tides,

Just like hopes springing high,

Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?

Bowed head and lowered eyes?

Shoulders falling down like teardrops,

Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?

Don’t you take it awful hard

‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines

Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?

Does it come as a surprise

That I dance like I’ve got diamonds

At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame

I rise

Up from a past that’s rooted in pain

I rise

I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,

Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear

I rise

Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear

I rise

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,

I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

I rise

I rise

I rise.

I rise to speak the truth about my people. I rise from the depth of the ocean to place myself and my people back into a conversation that we have historically left out. At a time when theory fills in the gaps for perspectives of those who have deathly forgotten. We must rise!

The 1ac is designed complicate our understanding to the Earth’s ocean, but who is our? Me and My ancestors relationship to the ocean need not be complicated, but rather need to be left alone. The relationship that we have to the ocean is something that was and is forced upon us. From the violent and torturous kidnapping of Africans from their homeland, blacks were forced to create a connection to the ocean. The ocean is grave of unknowable amount of my ancestors… as their bodies line the ocean floor, it is no wonder why the black queer seeks to retreat from the water. It is some stereotypical shit like “black people cant swim”, but the water has been the transporation route for those route of bodies. Embracing an analysis of the ocean would be the same to affirming the boat, the chains and whips, and the men enforcing the slavetide regulations.  We must rise for WE ARE THE SCREAM OF THE MIDDLE PASSAGE!

The analysis of black queer subjects in the atlantic and to the ocean in the 1ac mirrors the oppression that the Middle passage brought upon the slave. As they were starved and beaten, they were reminded that everything that they knew before was no longer true or real – they were encouraged to accept complication as explanation for life, forced to be the object of thought of the settler, lashed by the tongue of the master, and marketed as the free world’s work horse.

PRESENCE is important not just for physical representation, but to challenge the construction of knowledge we have learned as an expression of freedom.  Those who are the afforded the ability explore are those who have the privilege and luxury to do so. They explore as an expression of intellectual emancipation, justice, and automony. Exploring the understanding of the oceans only produces an anti-ethical relationship to the struggles black queer bodies because the search for intersubjectivity happens outside the bounds of the black queer body historically. Gills explain in 2012 that….

Gill Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies @ UT-Austin 2012Lyndon K. “Situating Black, Situating Queer: Black Queer Diaspora Studies and the Art of Embodied Listening” Transforming Anthropology 20.1 EBSCO

If a Black queer diasporic consciousness encourages the kinds of perspectival shifts that permit different visions of queer possibility to emerge from the impermanent places Black queer people inhabit and the fertile impermanence that inhabits Black queerness, then it must not be satisfied with discursive treatments of Black queer subjects,Black queer subjectivity or even the juridical, moral and theoretical contexts in which Black queers find themselves.Black queer diaspora studies remains incomplete without the appearance of Black queers not simply as representational abstractions, but as situated, speaking subjects.4 This praxis of Black queer presence is intended to insistently foreground the material reality, quotidian experiences and cultural products of Black queer peoples. Anthropologist Gloria Wekker has offered her work as a call for rooted, contextconscious analyses of Black diasporic same-sex community (as well as sexual practices) that do not trample blossoming specificities in the haste to cultivate a haphazard global same-sex sexuality. And this call is at once part of a delicate symbiosis between a critique of transnational sexuality studies and a desire to elaborate a very specifically situated sexual subjectivity. As Wekker explains, attending to this subjecthood demands that one listen closely:

One possible fruitful way to open windows to local conceptions of personhood is to listen carefully to what people have to say about themselves and what terms they use to make these statements. Collecting and studying a contextualized lexicon of the self can provide an understanding of the ways subjectivity is locally conceptualized. [Wekker 1997:333]

The 1nc quares the reading of the 1ac. The affirmative of intersubjectivity nevitablility places the world ( and everything in it, including the black queer bodu in a position to be acted on by the position of the explorer. Our argument is that the openness that the 1ac exhibits to the world, is the same openness that fueled by the execution of the black queer body. Only the struggle of the black queer is placed in the political memory of the 1ac, but the bodies of the black queer is thrown overboard like the settlers did those imperfect niggas . We seek not to understand the complication that arises from a position of absolute direlection, but rather find the lost bodies of the Africa.  Attempts to affirm intersubjectivity within debate privilege those with the power to go on an investigation of idenity while furthering the oppression of black and queer bodie in debate.

Hundreds of people

Every weekend I see

And for barely any of them to ever look like me is just…

Implicit of the complicit and their intention to miss it

The mission omits the faces of the missionaries

So we get done the traditional way, let’s call it missionary

I see as we take off

In this face off,

They want me to take my race off

And ignore the factor of race that daily affects me,

And the ways being a Black man in this space perplex me,

And how when Im in their faces to speak on it

They respect me

But when they construct thought experiments,

They never seem to reflect me

So concerned with intersubjectivity

They short circuit the ability to shake the bullshit,

No palpitations

Just amalgamations

Of their agendas and the effects on the people

Hell bent on makin a miracle appear without a church and a steeple

Missing the mark

So if you tryna spark it ima be the flame

Being being shut up,

To being shame,

To finally screaming my name,

Cuz its forgotten in the monotony

Of what it means to create change

And see how my people’s perspectives can bring light

To the darkest of days

Flip the switch!

Cuz I tell you I’ll be the daughter of a snitch

Before the bastard son of political passivity

See Ima crack the world twice

Before it takes another dirty swing at me

And its gon be what its gon be

We have come to paint your ivory towers black again

Cuz my hope wont let me leave

And pride wont let my pride stop from my pride crashing in

Standstill

I will not,

I’ll stand from the hill top,

Don’t care care If you say stop,

Cuz Im looking for the black people.

This debate is about which team best performatively rises from the depths of the ocean. We need not to deepen the depths of the ocean or our understanding of it, but rather rise from the complicated, messy  conflicted naturethat the world has attempted to throw the slave in. The 1nc is a performative interruption to the complications and embracement of the black queer revolutionary call to rise from the ocean with life-ever lasting! DO JESUS!

JOHNSON 2K6 [Patrick E., “professor of African American studies and performance studies at Northwestern University, “Quare Studies or (almost) everything I know about Queer Studies I learned from my grandmother” in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology

It also is a performance of self for the self in a moment of self-reflexivity that has the potential to transform one’s view of self in relation to the world. People have a need to exercise control over the production of their images so that they feel empowered. For the disenfranchised, the recognition, construction, and maintenance of self image and cultural identity functions to sustain, even when social systems and codes fail to do so. Granted, formations or performances of identity may simply reify oppressive systems, but they may also contest and subvert dominant meaning systems. When gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered people “talk back,” whether using the “tools of the master” or the vernacular on the streets , their voices, singularly or collectively, do not exist in some vacuous wasteland of discursivity. As symbolic anthropologist Victor turner suggests, their performances are not simple reflectors or expressions of culture or even of changing culture but may themselves be active agencies of change, representing the eye by which culture sees itself and the drawing board on which creative actors sketch out what they believe to be more apt or interesting “ designs for living.”…Performative reflexivity is a condition in which a sociocultural group, or its most perceptive members acting representatively, turn, bend, or reflect back upon themselves, upon the relations, actions, symbols, meanings, codes, roles, statuses, social structures, ethical and legal rules, and other sociocultural components which make up their public selves.

The question is not how do WE respond, but why could you respond with me? 

Example 1AC

History-making is beholden to a hegemonic knowledge production which perpetuates the concealing of the unimaginable suffering of, and resistance to the Middle Passage. This history attempts to write an epistemological stability onto the ocean. These attempts will ultimately fail because the Ocean is not stable, instead it represents a crosscurrent of race, nationality, sexuality and gender. The Ocean produces this counter-knowledge of fluidity and flux, Blackness and Queerness, and it is these crossings that make the Ocean an integral site of investigation for subjugated identities.

Tinsley assistant professor in the departments of English and African American studies at the University of Minnesota 2008 Omise'eke Natasha “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies project muse

And water, ocean water is the first thing in the unstable confluence of race, nationality, sexuality, and gender I want to imagine here. This wateriness is metaphor, and history too. The brown-skinned, fluid-bodied experiences now called blackness and queerness surfaced in intercontinental, maritime contacts hundreds of years ago: in the seventeenth century, in the Atlantic Ocean. You see, the black Atlantic has always been the queer Atlantic. What Paul Gilroy never told us is how queer relationships were forged on merchant and pirate ships, where Europeans [End Page 191] and Africans slept with fellow—and I mean same-sex—sailors. And, more powerfully and silently, how queer relationships emerged in the holds of slave ships that crossed between West Africa and the Caribbean archipelago. I began to learn this black Atlantic when I was studying relationships between women in Suriname and delved into the etymology of the word mati. This is the word Creole women use for their female lovers: figuratively mi mati is "my girl," but literally it means mate, as in shipmate—she who survived the Middle Passage with me. Sedimented layers of experience lodge in this small word. During the Middle Passage, as colonial chronicles, oral tradition, and anthropological studies tell us, captive African women created erotic bonds with other women in the sex-segregated holds, and captive African men created bonds with other men. In so doing, they resisted the commodification of their bought and sold bodies by feeling and feeling for their co-occupants on these ships.

I evoke this history now not to claim the slave ship as the origin of the black queer Atlantic. The ocean obscures all origins, and neither ship nor Atlantic can be a place of origin. Not of blackness, though perhaps Africans first became negros and negers during involuntary sea transport; not of queerness, though perhaps some Africans were first intimate with same-sex shipmates then. Instead, in relationship to blackness, queerness, and black queerness, the Atlantic is the site of what the anthropologist Kale Fajardo calls "crosscurrents."

Oceans and seas are important sites for differently situated people. Indignous Peoples, fisherpeople, seafarers, sailors, tourists, workers, and athletes. Oceans and seas are sites of inequality and exploitation—resource extraction, pollution, militarization, atomic testing, and genocide. At the same time, oceans and seas are sites of beauty and pleasure—solitude, sensuality, desire, and resistance. Oceanic and maritime realms are also spaces of transnational and diasporic communities, heterogeneous trajectories of globalizations, and other racial, gender, class, and sexual formations.1

Conceptualizing the complex possibilities and power dynamics of the maritime, Fajardo posits the necessity of thinking through transoceanic crosscurrents. These are theoretical and ethnographic borderlands at sea, where elements or currents of historical, conceptual, and embodied maritime experience come together to transform racialized, gendered, classed, and sexualized selves. The queer black Atlantic I discuss here navigates these crosscurrents as it brings together enslaved and African, brutality and desire, genocide and resistance. Here, fluidity is not an [End Page 192] easy metaphor for queer and racially hybrid identities but for concrete, painful, and liberatory experience. It is the kind of queer of color space that Roderick Ferguson calls for in Aberrations in Black, one that reflects the materiality of black queer experience while refusing its transparency.2

The Ocean is an archive of literary texts the can either reveal or conceal the unimaginable of the Middle Passage. Juxtaposing our reading of the ocean against the topic’s narrative of exploration and development is necessary to expose the narrow conceptions of facticity that continue to cover the history of the blackness and queerness of the Oceans. Therefore, we should complicate this understanding of the Earth’s Ocean through the lens of the Middle Passage and the erotic resistance that arose from its fluidity and flux.

Tinsley assistant professor in the departments of English and African American studies at the University of Minnesota 2008 Omise'eke Natasha “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies project muse

If the black queer Atlantic brings together such long-flowing history, why is black queer studies situated as a dazzlingly new "discovery" in academia—a hybrid, mermaidlike imagination that has yet to find its land legs? In the last five years, black queer and queer of color critiques have navigated innovative directions in African diaspora studies as scholars like Ferguson and E. Patrick Johnson push the discipline to map intersections between racialized and sexualized bodies. Unfortunately, Eurocentric queer theorists and heterocentric race theorists have engaged their discourses of resistant black queerness as a new fashion—a glitzy, postmodern invention borrowed and adapted from Euro-American queer theory. In contrast, as interventions like the New-York Historical Society's exhibit Slavery in New York demonstrate, the Middle Passage and slave experience continue to be evoked as authentic originary sites of African diaspora identities and discourses.3 This stark split between the "newest" and "oldest" sites of blackness reflects larger political trends that polarize queer versus diasporic and immigrant issues by moralizing and domesticating sexuality as an undermining of tradition, on the one hand, while racializing and publicizing global southern diasporas as threats to the integrity of a nation of (fictively) European immigrants, on the other. My discussion here proposes to intervene in this polarization by bridging imaginations of the "choice" of black queerness and the forced migration of the Middle Passage. What would it mean for both queer and African diaspora studies to take seriously the possibility that, as forcefully as the Atlantic and Caribbean flow together, so too do the turbulent fluidities of blackness and queerness? What new geography—or as Fajardo proposes, oceanography—of sexual, gendered, transnational, and racial identities might emerge through reading for black queer history and theory in the traumatic dislocation of the Middle Passage?4

In what follows, I explore such queer black Atlantic oceanographies by comparing two narrative spaces. One is a site where an imagination of this Atlantic struggles to emerge: in academic theorizing, specifically in water metaphors of African diaspora and queer theory. The second is a site where such imaginations emerge through struggle: in Caribbean creative writing, specifically in Ana Maurine Lara's tale of queer migration in Erzulie's Skirt (2006) and Dionne Brand's reflections on the Middle Passage in A Map to the Door of No Return (2001). I turn to these literary texts as a queer, unconventional, and imaginative archive of the black Atlantic.5 And the literary texts turn to ocean waters themselves as [End Page 193] an archive, an ever-present, ever-reformulating record of the unimaginable. Lara and Brand plumb the archival ocean materially, as space that churns with physical remnants, dis(re)membered bodies of the Middle Passage, and they plumb it metaphorically, as opaque space to convey the drowned, disremembered, ebbing and flowing histories of violence and healing in the African diaspora. "Water overflows with memory," writes M. Jacqui Alexander, delving into the Middle Passage in Pedagogies of Crossing. "Emotional memory. Bodily memory. Sacred memory."6 Developing a black feminist epistemology to uncover submerged histories—particularly those stories of Africans' forced ocean crossings that traditional historiography cannot validate—Alexander eloquently argues that searchers must explore outside narrow conceptions of the "factual" to get there. Such explorations would involve muddying divisions between documented and intuited, material and metaphoric, past and present so that "who is remembered—and how—is continually being transformed through a web of interpretive systems . . . collapsing, ultimately, the demarcation of the prescriptive past, present, and future of linear time."7 While Alexander searches out such crossings in Afro-Atlantic ceremony, Lara and Brand explore similarly fluid embodied-imaginary, historical-contemporary spaces through the literal and figurative passages of their historical fictions. The subaltern can speak in submarine space, but it is hard to hear her or his underwater voice, whispering (as Brand writes) a thousand secrets that at once wash closer and remain opaque, resisting closure.

This notion of eroticism is an expansion of the conceptualization of subjectivity via an investigation of the interrelation among the political, the sensual and the spiritual. It’s coherence is only approached through its assemblage of differences. This erotic subjectivity provides a lens to evaluate our investigation which challenges apolitical and passionless interpretations of epistemological foundations. The story we tell is always already intertwined with the unsymbolizable scream of the Middle Passage – the question is how do we respond.

Gill Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies @ UT-Austin 2012 Lyndon K. “Situating Black, Situating Queer: Black Queer Diaspora Studies and the Art of Embodied Listening” Transforming Anthropology 20.1 EBSCO

The interrelation among the political, the sensual the spiritual is central to my elaboration of what I (among others11) have termed “erotic subjectivity.” However, my usage of “erotic subjectivity” is as a decidedly epistemological proposition. I am curious to explore the potential of reading Fields’ particularly placed subjectivity as a challenge to apolitical, passionless, and secular interpretations of how we come to know what we know about subjectivity itself. I propose this interlinked political-sensual-spiritual (erotic) subjectivity not necessarily in an effort to replace one type of “universal” subjectivity with another, but rather to expand the conceptualization of subjectivity so that it perhaps comes to resemble diaspora—its coherence only intelligible through an assemblage of differences.

As an interpretive frame, erotic subjectivity is indebted to Caribbean-American lesbian feminist Audre Lorde’s framing of the erotic in her 1978 speech “Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power.”12 In it, Lorde insists that:

The dichotomy between the spiritual and the political is … false, resulting from an incomplete attention to our erotic knowledge. For the bridge which connects them is formed by the erotic—sensual—those physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us, being shared: the passion of love in its deepest meanings. [Lorde 1984(1978)]

Following from this reconceptualization and encouraged by Lorde’s gesture toward reading the erotic through sensuality (even in its broadest sense as revelry in the senses) to a wider range of interpretive possibilities, I propose that the meaning of the erotic can be stretched. Informed by Lorde, my articulation of the erotic expands beyond being mere euphemism for sexual desire and reaches simultaneously toward a political attentiveness and a spiritual consciousness. This tripartite political-sensual-spiritual awareness makes possible and desirable a more broadly and deeply conceived articulation of love. And it is this love that so often provides much of the motivation for political action, sensual intimacy and spiritual hunger—together constitutive elements of an erotic subjecthood.

Erotic subjectivity is at once an interpretive perspective and a mode of consciousness; it is both a way of reading and a way of being in the world. This analytic frame encourages a recognition of the fact that systems of colonial (as well as neocolonial/ imperial) domination depend in part upon a tripartite strategy of coercion based upon a politics of ontological racial difference, a hierarchy of spiritual rectitude, and a Victorian sense of (sexual) respectability—erotic subjugation, if you will. Erotic subjectivity is tasked with providing a postcolonial theoretical response to this mechanism of subjugation. This expanded political-sensual-spiritual perspective on the production of hierarchies of difference—the very alterity used to justify exploitation from the top down—begins to shed light on the incompleteness of official post-colonial movements (and their long range postcolonial ideological projects) in the Caribbean region, which largely continue to imagine the political, sensual and spiritual as mutually exclusive realms of concern. The inability to think the political/ sensual/spiritual together threatens to obscure even the clearest of postcolonial visions. This particular attentiveness to—in their most abstract rendering— power hierarchies (the political), sensory intimacy (the sensual), and sacred metaphysics (the spiritual) is central to the theoretical infrastructure of the larger book manuscript from which this analysis comes, so I cannot hope to fully elaborate it here.13 However, perhaps the best way to approach a fleshier understanding of erotic subjectivity may be through Jacquelyn Fields’ own sense of herself and her community.

Debating From Your Subject Position - Evidence

Having trouble figuring out your role in criticism and in discussion of race, gender, sexuality? This piece of evidence outlines a strategy - what do you think about it? 

WHAT CAN WHITE PEOPLE DO—Their approach should not be an attempt to seek a world beyond of racism before fully confront the structural issue. The impossible position of a critical whiteness studies is to inhabit a critique without attempting  to resolve it—wielding a critique that ceaselessly implicates the critic.  That is, to occupy the structural position of privilege while preventing privileges reification or a turn back toward whiteness—the critical whiteness theorist( the judge) must come to terms this impossible position.

Ahmed, Sara 2006, declarations of whiteness http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no2_2004/ahmed_declarations.htm

You might not be surprised to hear that a white response to this paper has asked the question, ‘but what are white people to do’. That question is not necessarily misguided, although it does re-center on white agency, as a hope premised on lack rather than presence. It is a question asked persistently in response to hearing about racism and colonialism:I always remember being in an audience to a paper on the stolen generation and the first question asked was: ‘but what can we do’. The impulse towards action is understandable and complicated; it can be both a defense against the ‘shock’ of hearing about racism (and the shock of the complicity revealed by the very ‘shock’ that ‘this’ was a ‘shock’);it can be an impulse to reconciliation as a ‘re-covering’ of the past (the desire to feel better); it can be about making public one’s judgment (‘what happened was wrong’); or it can be an expression of solidarity (‘I am with you’); or it can simply an orientation towards the openness of the future (rephrased as: ‘what can be done?’).But the question, in all of these modes of utterance, can work to block hearing;in moving on from the present towards the future, it can also move away from the object of critique, or place the white subject ‘outside’ that critique in the present of the hearing. In other words, the desire to act, to move, or even to move on, can stop the message ‘getting through’.

To hear the work of exposure requires that white subjects inhabit the critique,with its lengthy duration, and to recognise the world that is re-described by the critique as one in which they live.The desire to act in a non-racist or anti-racist way when one hears about racism, in my view, can function as a defense against hearing how that racism implicates which subjects, in the sense that it shapes the spaces inhabited by white subjects in the unfinished present. Such a question can even allow the white subject to re-emerge as an agent in the face of the exposure of racism, by saying ‘I am not that’ (the racists of whom you speak), as an expression of ‘good faith’. The desire for action, or even the desire to be seen as the good white anti-racist subject, is not always a form of bad faith, that is, it does not necessarily involve the concealment of racism.But such a question rushes too quickly past the exposure of racism and hence ‘risks’ such concealment in the very ‘return’ of its address.
58. I am of course riskingbeing seen asproducing a ‘useless’ critique by not prescribing what an anti-racist whiteness studies would be, or by not offering some suggestions about ‘what white people can do’. I am happy to take that risk. At the same time, I think it is quite clear that my critique of ‘anti-racist whiteness’ is prescriptive. After all, I am arguing that whiteness studies, even in its critical form, should not be about re- describing the white subject as anti-racist, or constitute itself as a form of anti-racism, or even as providing the conditions for anti-racism. Whiteness studies should instead be about attending to forms of white racism and white privilege that are not undone, and may even be repeated and intensified, through declarations of whiteness, or through the recognition of privilege as privilege.
59. In making this prescription, it is important that I do not rush to ‘inhabit’ a ‘beyond’ to the work of exposing racism, as that which structures the present that we differently inhabit.At the same time, it is always tempting to end one’s work with an expression of political hope. Such hope is what makes the work of critique possible, in the sense that without hope, the future would be decided, and there would be nothing left to do. Perhaps its time to ‘return’ to the ‘turn’ of whiteness studies, by asking where else we might turn. If ‘whiteness studies’ turns towards white privilege, as that which enables and endures declarations of whiteness, then this does not simply involve turning towards the white subject, which would amount to the narcissism of a perpetual return. Rather, whiteness studies should involve at least a double turn: to turn towards whiteness is to turn towards and away from those bodies who have been afforded agency and

mobility by such privilege. In other words, the task for white subjects would be to stay implicated in what they critique, but in turning towards their role and responsibility in these histories of racism, as histories of this present, to turn away from themselves, and towards others.This ‘double turn’ is not sufficient, but it clears some ground, upon which the work of exposing racism might provide the conditions for another kind of work. We don’t know, as yet, what such conditions might be, or whether we are even up to the task of recognizing them.

Wednesday Electives

BLB 80 w/Ryan

7-8 - Race
8-9 - Performance

BLB 180 w/Gabe

7-8 - Class
8-9 - Lacan

Room Locations Week 1

Tuesday 7/8
Morning - GAB 317
Afternoon - GAB 317
Evening - BLB 250

Wednesday 7/9
Morning - BLB 90
Afternoon - BLB 90
Evening - AUDB 201/202

Thursday 7/10
Morning - BLB 270
Afternoon - BLB 80
Evening - BLB 80

Friday 7/11
Morning - BLB 65
Afternoon -  BLB 270

Saturday 7/12
Morning - BLB 73
Afternoon - BLB 270
Evening - BLB 270

Sunday 7/13
Afternoon - BLB 270
Evening - BLB 270

Day Two: Questions?

Post any questions you have here so you don't forget! At least one question per student by the end of the day - thanks!

Day One: Lectures and Discussion

Day One will focus on what it means to criticize, we will explore history, debate and the act of criticism through three lectures:

1) Where Are We Going, Where Have We Been: Critical Theory with Sydney Pasquinelli (you can read "Traditional and Critical Theory" by Max Horkheimer here.)

2) Debating With Conviction with Ryan Wash

3) Nietzsche is Dead: Reading Kung Fu Panda with Gabe Murillo

Please leave comments and questions to guide our discussions later today

Introducing our final lab leader - Ignacio Evans!

Very excited to announce that Ignacio Evans will be joining the Mean Green K Lab for the final 2 weeks of the institute! Ignacio debated and coaches for Towson University where helped coach the 2014 CEDA Nationals Champions. Ignacio is an amazing community leader and teacher who will intellectually challenge students and instructors - can't wait for him to join us!  

Welcome to the Mean Green K Lab - Introduce yourself!

Very excited to be starting the Mean Green K Lab tomorrow! We will be using this website to post materials and have discussions - make sure to check back here frequently and follow us on twitter! If you are in the lab leave a comment here and tell us a little about yourself so we can start to get to know you!

Innovation and Failure: The Under Appreciated Skills of a Policy Debater

I am going to expand on a theme I've been writing about. Some of the below has already been presented by the CEDA president in a recent social media campaign and by me in a Keynote Address to the Michigan Jaycees. Enjoy!

In order to stay a step ahead of opponents policy debaters are encouraged to take the basic building block of an argument and innovate new ways to refute their opponents. One of the primary ways debate maintains flexibility in training is by having a limited number of formal rules and encouraging debaters to create the world of debate that best serves their needs and the training they desire. Unlike other competitive forums were students are beholden to one interpretation of the game they play, debates strongest feature is its ability to innovate via in round debates. From speed talking, to interpreting topics creatively or using different forms of academic research debate forces students to stay ahead of the argumentative curve.

In fact, the format for debate is itself debatable. This feature teaches skills in advocacy that no other activity can match. To an outsider this contestation may be confusing or frustrating, but in the academic world of debate this contestation is what makes the activity innovative. This skill is essential to advocacy that includes the creation or amending of rules, standards or norms. In an ever more quickly changing world the ability to innovate is necessary to be successful in any field, and debate trains innovation better than any other activity.     

Debate also encourages innovation as a response to failure. In policy debate students must deal with the consequences of failure. In every debate a student either wins or losses and no team has ever been undefeated through their entire careers. Often time students only have a matter of minutes in between losing one debate and having to start another. Learning to take a loss, and learning from that loss is a unique aspect of policy debate, this process leads to the creativity necessary for innovation. Students must learn to dwell in this failure and according to Judith Halberstam that is in and of itself productive,  

"Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world... Perhaps most obviously, failure allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development with the goal of delivering us from unruly childhoods to orderly and predictable adulthoods. Failure preserves some of the wondrous anarchy of childhood and disturbs the supposedly clean boundaries between adults and children, winners and losers." (Halberstam, 2-3) 

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Halberstam, Judith The Queer Art of Failure Durham & London: Duke University Press 2011