John McLeod, (ed.), How Newness Enters Postcolonial Studies

John McLeod, (ed.), How Newness Enters Postcolonial Studie

In Conversation with Velma Pollard

In Conversation with Velma Pollard(Spring 2018)by Simona Bertacc

Imagining Bodies in the Work of Dionne Brand

This essay explores the interface between the re-writing of history and the re-writing of the history of sexuality in the poetry and fiction by the Caribbean-Canadian writer Dionne Brand. Starting from her poetry book No Language Is Neutral (1990), as the first work in which she openly deals with lesbian love and sexuality, and closing with her novel At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999), this paper traces the narrative of non-heterosexual love and desire in Dionne Brand’s work, reading the representation of the racialized and sexed body in Brand’s writing in the light of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the body

Postcolonial Literatures as Disrespected Literatures?

This essay focuses on the challenges as well as the joys of reading postcolonial literary texts that are composed and printed in multiple, alternating languages. What postcolonial texts make manifest through their syntax, vocabulary, and style is the wide array of creative expression that the simultaneous presence of multiple languages makes available to the writer.  A literary analysis able to appreciate this creative potential is in order if we want to go beyond an outdated understanding of literature and its forms.  It is in fact in the act of reading that a lot of the disrespect surrounding postcolonial literature manifests itself. Caribbean literature marks an ideal place to start exploring the possibilities of a postcolonial literary analysis. A region “once deemed the antithesis of civilization” has become one of the most creative laboratories of verbal art, both written and oral, thanks to its radical creolization of the colonial languages. In the second part of my essay, I will present a model of literary analysis that uses as its crucial categories those coming from the traditionally disrespected language of the region: Creole.This essay focuses on the challenges as well as the joys of reading postcolonial literary texts that are composed and printed in multiple, alternating languages. What postcolonial texts make manifest through their syntax, vocabulary, and style is the wide array of creative expression that the simultaneous presence of multiple languages makes available to the writer.  A literary analysis able to appreciate this creative potential is in order if we want to go beyond an outdated understanding of literature and its forms.  It is in fact in the act of reading that a lot of the disrespect surrounding postcolonial literature manifests itself. Caribbean literature marks an ideal place to start exploring the possibilities of a postcolonial literary analysis. A region “once deemed the antithesis of civilization” has become one of the most creative laboratories of verbal art, both written and oral, thanks to its radical creolization of the colonial languages. In the second part of my essay, I will present a model of literary analysis that uses as its crucial categories those coming from the traditionally disrespected language of the region: Creole

Equation of state and self-bound droplet in Rabi-coupled Bose mixtures

Laser induced transitions between internal states of atoms have been playing a fundamental role to manipulate atomic clouds for many decades. In absence of interactions each atom behaves independently and their coherent quantum dynamics is described by the Rabi model. Since the experimental observation of Bose condensation in dilute gases, static and dynamical properties of multicomponent quantum gases have been extensively investigated. Moreover, at very low temperatures quantum fluctuations crucially affect the equation of state of many-body systems. Here we study the effects of quantum fluctuations on a Rabi-coupled two-component Bose gas of interacting alkali atoms. The divergent zero-point energy of gapless and gapped elementary excitations of the uniform system is properly regularized obtaining a meaningful analytical expression for the beyond-mean-field equation of state. In the case of attractive inter-particle interaction we show that the quantum pressure arising from Gaussian fluctuations can prevent the collapse of the mixture with the creation of a self-bound droplet. We characterize the droplet phase and discover an energetic instability above a critical Rabi frequency provoking the evaporation of the droplet. Finally, we suggest an experiment to observe such quantum droplets using Rabi-coupled internal states of $^{39}$K atoms.Comment: to be published in Scientific Report

Philoctete’s Healing: Echoes of Dante’s Purgatorio in Walcott’s Omeros

A complex reading adventure is the one awaiting the reader of Omeros, a book-length poem published by Derek Walcott in 1990 and, with a title reminiscent of the Greek poet par excellence, an ideal text to talk about re-writings and re-readings of the Western literary tradition.  As readers, we enter Omeros expecting a re-writing of the Odyssey. We find, instead, a text that recalls, in its structure, themes and prosody, Dante’s Commedia, in particular, the Purgatorio.In our reading of Walcott alongside with Dante, we will concentrate on the character of Philoctete with whom Omeros begins and on the theme of healing that he embodies. While Philoctetes is a minor character in Homer’s Odyssey, Walcott’s appropriation of the Greek character in Omeros is enhanced by his reading of Dante. The theme of healing is pervasive in Walcott’s Omeros, but it is even more emblematic in Dante’s vision of repentance and salvation in the second cantica of his Commedia: the Purgatorio. Interestingly, in Walcott’s “postcolonial Purgatory,” Philoctete remains a minor character and is not turned into a postcolonial hero.Our analysis will focus on the theme of healing, on the vision of history that is unlocked through a comparison between the authors’ worlds, and on Dante’s and Walcott’s creative use of terza rima, the aspect of the poems that – before anything else – brings them together

Fe/GeTe(111) heterostructures as an avenue towards 'ferroelectric Rashba semiconductors'-based spintronics

By performing density functional theory (DFT) and Green's functions calculations, complemented by X-ray Photoemission Spectroscopy, we investigate the electronic structure of Fe/GeTe(111), a prototypical ferromagnetic/Rashba-ferroelectric interface. We reveal that such system exhibits several intriguing properties resulting from the complex interplay of exchange interaction, electric polarization and spin-orbit coupling. Despite a rather strong interfacial hybridization between Fe and GeTe bands, resulting in a complete suppression of the surface states of the latter, the bulk Rashba bands are hardly altered by the ferromagnetic overlayer. This could have a deep impact on spin dependent phenomena observed at this interface, such as spin-to-charge interconversion, which are likely to involve bulk rather than surface Rashba states.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure