scholarly journals Imperial (S)Kin: The Orthography of the Wake in Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black

2020 ◽  
Vol 55 (s2) ◽  
pp. 465-494
Author(s):  
Rūta Šlapkauskaitė
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Institutional Racism ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Dysfunctional Family ◽  
Hot Air ◽  
Epistemic Violence ◽  
Scientific Laboratory ◽  
Narrative Performance ◽  
Black Critical Theory

Abstract The publication of Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black has placed the novel among other works of history and art, which recall the material and epistemic violence of institutional racism and the lasting trauma of its legacy. Thus by interlacing, within the context of black critical theory, Yogita Goyal’s and Laura T. Murphy’s examining of the neo-slave narrative with Christina Sharpe’s conceptualization of the wake and Alexander G. Weheliye’s notion of habeas viscus as critical frames for the discussion of racialized subjectivity, I consider how Edugyan’s use of the conventions of Victorian adventure literature and the slave narrative rethinks the entanglements between the imperial commodification of life and the scientific agenda of natural history. Given how the narrative emphasizes the somatic register and its epidermal terms as a scene of meaning, I bring together Frantz Fanon’s idea of epidermalization, Steven Connor’s phenomenological reading of the skin, and Calvin L. Warren’s reasoning about blackness in an attempt to highlight the metalepsis resulting from the novel’s use of the hot air-balloon and the octopus as dermatropes that cast the empire as simultaneously a dysfunctional family and a scientific laboratory. Loaded into the skin as a master trope is the conceptual cross-over between consciousness and conscience, whose narrative performance in the novel nourishes the affective labour of its reader as an agent of memory.

scholarly journals INSTITUTIONAL RACISM IN AMERICAN POST-CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT IN DEAR MARTIN BY NIC STONE (2017)

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Afifah Indriani ◽  
Delvi Wahyuni
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Institutional Racism ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Group Interest ◽  
Post Civil Rights

This thesis is an analysis of a novel written by Nic Stone entitled Dear Martin (2017). It explores the issue of institutional racism in the post-civil rights era. The concept of systemic racism by Joe R.Feagin is employed to analyze this novel. This analysis focuses on four issues of systemic racism as seen through several African-American characters. This analysis also depends on the narrator to determine which parts of the novel are used as the data. The result of the study shows that African-American characters experience four forms of institutional racism which are The White Racial Frame and Its Embedded Racist Ideology, Alienated Social Relations, Racial Hierarchy with Divergent Group Interest, and Related Racial Domination: Discrimination in Many Aspects. In conclusion, in this post-civil rights movement era, African-Americans still face institutional racism.

The Form of Man

Human Forms ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 31-54
Author(s):  
Ian Duncan
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Analogical Reasoning ◽  
Probabilistic Reasoning ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
History Of ◽  
Scientific Project ◽  
The One

This chapter examines how the science of man became the natural history of man, a history not of individuals or nations but of the human species. A new biological conception of species “as an entity distributed in time and space,” released from the synchronic grid of Linnaean taxonomy as well as from a providential cosmology, comprised what Philip Sloan has called the “Buffonian revolution.” That revolution would be as consequential for literary genres, especially the novel, as it was for the natural and human sciences, in part due to Buffon's recourse to a literary style and techniques of “speculative thought experiment,” probabilistic reasoning, “analogical reasoning, and divination” in his scientific method. The chapter then looks at the debate over the history of man that broke out in the mid-1780s between Immanuel Kant and Gottfried Herder. One of the great intellectual quarrels of the late Enlightenment, it signposted the forking paths of Kant's critical philosophy, on the one hand, and the scientific project of natural history on the other.

Honoring the Form: Zen Moves in Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale

2010 ◽  
Vol 14 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 59-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Collins
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
The Self ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Eastern Philosophy ◽  
Charles Johnson ◽  
Graphic Narrative ◽  
Picaresque Novel ◽  
The World

AbstractIn Being and Race Charles Johnson compares a writer working with traditional forms to a martial artist who “honors the form” of his predecessors. In his 1982 novel Oxherding Tale Johnson honors the form of a number of traditional fictional genres, including the slave narrative, the picaresque novel, the philosophical novel of ideas, and Zen texts such as koans, sutras, and the twelfth-century graphic narrative, the “Oxherding Pictures.” Calling his novel a “slave narrative that serves as the vehicle for exploring Eastern philosophy,” Johnson alludes to Hindu, Taoist and Buddhist texts, as well as to Western literary and philosophical works, to dissolve the dualistic thinking at the heart of what he calls “the samsara of racial politics.” To be free of the illusory nature of “ontological dualism,” however, one must journey through stages of increasing awareness, admirably depicted in the ten illustrations of the “Oxherding Pictures.” From seeking a self (ox) that one thinks one has lost, to glimpsing the self that is first elusive and finally illusory, the seeker comes to realize that all identities are constructed and therefore temporary, including such notions as “race” and “self.” Like some biracial Everyman, Johnson’s narrator may not complete the journey by the end of the novel but he discovers much about the insubstantiality and inter-connectedness of himself in the world along the way.

Solar Fixation of Atmospheric Nitrogen

2004 ◽  
Vol 126 (1) ◽  
pp. 626-632 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Epstein ◽  
Rudi Bertocchi ◽  
Jacob Karni
Keyword(s):  
Residence Time ◽  
Atmospheric Nitrogen ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Test Results ◽  
Hot Air ◽  
Economical Benefit ◽  
Fixation Reaction ◽  
Solar Receiver ◽  
Kinetics Of ◽  
Commercial Size

The thermal fixation of atmospheric nitrogen is explored, using a recently developed concept of a particle-seeded solar receiver. The thermodynamics and the kinetics of the formation of nitric oxide (NO) in air at temperatures of about 2300 K are analyzed, and the required residence time and the time to reach the steady state of the reaction between nitrogen and oxygen are calculated. The novel particle-seeded receiver concept is briefly described. The adaptation of the particle-seeded receiver to the fixation reaction in terms of heating rate of the air and residence time is validated based on previous test results and complementary calculations. A proposed method where the solar receiver/reactor is simultaneously coupled with power production, using the exhausted hot air from the reactor to generate electricity, is described. This concept can definitely increase the economical benefit of the process and, thus, its potential attractiveness. Some illustrative figures for a commercial size system are provided.

scholarly journals A strategy to digitise natural history collections with limited resources

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joaquim Santos ◽  
Paulo Rupino da Cunha ◽  
Fátima Sales
Keyword(s):  
Quality Control ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Digital Images ◽  
Limited Resources ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Slow Process ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
Stage Process ◽  
The University

The present work is a contribution towards accelerating the digitisation process of natural history collections, usually a slow process. A two-stage process was developed at the herbarium of the University of Coimbra: (i) a new workflow was established to automatically create records in the herbarium master database with minimum information, while capturing digital images; (ii) these records are then used to populate a web-based crowdsourcing platform where citizens are involved in the transcription of specimen labels from the digital images. This approach simplifies and accelerates databasing, reduces specimen manipulation and promotes the involvement of citizens in the scientific goals of the herbarium. The novel features of this process are: (i) the validation method of the crowdsourcing contribution that ensures quality control, enabling the data to integrate the master database directly and (ii) the field-by-field integration in the master database enables immediate corrections to any record in the catalogue.

Gestures Against Movements: Henry Box Brown and Economies of Narrative Performance

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Neary
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Black Body ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Textual Production ◽  
Narrative Performance

This chapter traces the various circuits—economic, narrative, performative—that structure black abolitionist textual production through the cultural work of Henry Box Brown. Building on Daphne Brooks’s analysis of Brown’s texts in particular, this chapter argues that we should consider black abolitionist performance in tandem with narrative performance: the unruly narrative gestures uncontained by the slave narrative form or the expectations of its primarily white readership. While Brown’s use of illustration and panorama allow us to read the slave narrative anew, the chapter claims that ex-slave narrators utilized a similar recognition of the iconicity of the black body and visual savvy in their narratives, producing rhetorical performances that challenge the ideological containment of the slave narrative. In attending to the textual aspects of visual culture, the chapter brings to light Brown’s insurgent iconoclasm which emerges to disrupt the “discursively claustrophobic tone and form” of even his most constrained 1849 narrative.

Octavia Butler’s Vampiric Vision

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy M. Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Human Blood ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Black Girl ◽  
Tragic Mulatto

Octavia Butler’s Fledgling (2005) chronicles the story of Shori Matthews, a 53-year-old vampire who looks like a 10-year-old black girl. Shori awakens with amnesia and physical scarring as a result of an attack from unknown assailants. While healing, she is hunted by clandestine factions of white-skinned vampires called the Ina. Shori later discovers that she is a product of amalgamated Ina and human blood. This chapter argues that Shori is a tragic mulatto figure in the vein of characters in novels like Iola Leroy, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,Our Nig, and Clotelle but written in the genre of science fiction and fantasy. The novel seems especially concerned with effects of familial and cultural devastation, trauma, miscegenation and xenophobia. While these are primary concerns of the slave narrative, these elements are also reflective of oppressive forces in modern societies that continue to play out master-slave relationships, often in concealed ways.

‘As constricting as the corset they bind me in to keep me a lady’: colonial historiography in Andrea Levy’s The Long Song

2019 ◽  
pp. 85-104
Author(s):  
Gigi Adair
Keyword(s):  
Nuclear Family ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Editorial Process ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Colonial Archives ◽  
The Way

This chapter shows how that Levy’s neo-slave narrative demonstrates both the potential for fiction to overcome the gaps in colonial archives and the limits of a postcolonial rewriting strategy that remains modelled on colonial historiography. The novel dramatizes the editorial process involved in both forms of historiography; it makes visible the exclusions and omissions required in order to craft a history which will be understood and accepted as properly historical – and the way in which this process also demands certain norms of kinship: linear, genealogical and based on the nuclear family. Likewise, the novel suggests that conservative, constraining gender norms, particularly for black diasporic women, are the necessary cost of cultural intelligibility, ‘respectability’ and the promise of historicity. Thus while Levy’s novel makes clear the price of this rewriting and becoming historical, it remains unclear whether another mode of postcolonial rewriting of history – one which does not measure itself against colonial historiography – is possible.

Transgendering Jesus: Mário Lúcio Sousa’s O Novíssimo Testamento and the Dismantling of Imperial Categories

2018 ◽  
pp. 264-286
Author(s):  
Daniel F. Silva
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Skin Color ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Epistemic Violence ◽  
Gayatri Spivak ◽  
The Fantastic ◽  
And Gender

This chapter examines how the novel combines the religious with elements of the fantastic in staging the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Placed within an existing field of global meanings, especially pertaining to notions of morality and propriety underpinned by racial and sexual discourses, Jesus confronts a world of stigma and suffering. As millions of people flock to Lém to seek out the messiah, many of which requesting miracles, Jesus comes face to face with imperial categorizations of bodies in terms of not only race and gender, but also of disease and disability. In doing so, she is forced to grapple with the construction and lived consequences of particular notions of normativity – of corporal ability, skin color, and gender – that inform privilege within Empire. The resolutions she seeks reveal a mission against what Michel Foucault and Gayatri Spivak call the epistemic violence of power, namely that of Empire.

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