"Let loose the dogs": Messiness and Ethical Wrangling in Toni Morrison\u27s Tar Baby

This paper metatextextually explores Toni Morrison’s 1981 Tar Baby and its female protagonist – a black model named Jadine Childs – by way of the text’s correlation with the Supermodel Phenomenon of the late 1970s and the early ’80s alongside social and political issues related to notions of post civil rights era racial arrival, success, and “selling out.” This argument draws a correlation between the experiences of the fictional Jadine and the internationally renowned supermodel Iman Abdulmajid whose career began in 1975. While this parallel is central to this essay’s execution, this article’s trajectory is informed and complicated by situating the character of Jadine in terms of historical research regarding the rise of the Supermodel Phenomenon and by way of reading the novel in the context of Black Pragmatism. Jadine confronts not only the tensions and expectation of the modeling world, but also the frictions between this professional realm and her black womanhood. These pressures are stressed in her relationships with her black radicalist lover, Son, her aunt Ondine, and the “woman in yellow” whom Jadine encounters in a Parisian supra market. By placing a black model in conversation with questions of authenticity and ancestry circulating in the post civil-rights era 1970’s and ‘80s America, Morrison leads her readers to question what it means to be truly “modern” or “fully integrated” and, contrarily, what it means to “sell out.” In its interrogation of racial arrival, this article suggests that this notion is not as definitive as Jadine has been taught to believe. Jadine’s final decision to pursue the possibility of a “fourth option” in Europe is, perhaps, a means of cultural re-approachment as opposed to a move toward “selling out.

Late Quaternary micromammals and the precipitation history of the southern Cape, South Africa: response to comments by F. Thackeray, Quaternary Research 95, 154–156

International audienc

Mammal community structure analysis

Peer reviewe

Assembly of the Caenorhabditis elegans gut microbiota from diverse soil microbial environments.

It is now well accepted that the gut microbiota contributes to our health. However, what determines the microbiota composition is still unclear. Whereas it might be expected that the intestinal niche would be dominant in shaping the microbiota, studies in vertebrates have repeatedly demonstrated dominant effects of external factors such as host diet and environmental microbial diversity. Hypothesizing that genetic variation may interfere with discerning contributions of host factors, we turned to Caenorhabditis elegans as a new model, offering the ability to work with genetically homogenous populations. Deep sequencing of 16S rDNA was used to characterize the (previously unknown) worm gut microbiota as assembled from diverse produce-enriched soil environments under laboratory conditions. Comparisons of worm microbiotas with those in their soil environment revealed that worm microbiotas resembled each other even when assembled from different microbial environments, and enabled defining a shared core gut microbiota. Community analyses indicated that species assortment in the worm gut was non-random and that assembly rules differed from those in their soil habitat, pointing at the importance of competitive interactions between gut-residing taxa. The data presented fills a gap in C. elegans biology. Furthermore, our results demonstrate a dominant contribution of the host niche in shaping the gut microbiota