Black Male Fiction and the Legacy of Caliban

With The Tempest’s Caliban, Shakespeare created an archetype in the modern era depicting black men as slaves and savages who threaten civilization. As contemporary black male fiction writers have tried to free their subjects and themselves from this legacy to tell a story of liberation, they often unconsciously retell the story, making their heroes into modern-day Calibans. Coleman analyzes the modern and postmodern novels of John Edgar Wideman, Clarence Major, Charles Johnson, William Melvin Kelley, Trey Ellis, David Bradley, and Wesley Brown. He traces the Caliban legacy to early literary influences, primarily Ralph Ellison, and then deftly demonstrates its contemporary manifestations. This engaging study challenges those who argue for the liberating possibilities of the postmodern narrative, as Coleman reveals the pervasiveness and influence of Calibanic discourse. At the heart of James Coleman’s study is the perceived history of the black male in Western culture and the traditional racist stereotypes indigenous to the language. Calibanic discourse, Coleman argues, so deeply and subconsciously influences the texts of black male writers that they are unable to cast off the oppression inherent in this discourse. Coleman wants to change the perception of black male writers’ struggle with oppression by showing that it is their special struggle with language. Black Male Fiction and the Legacy of Caliban is the first book to analyze a substantial body of black male fiction from a central perspective. James W. Coleman, professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the author of Blackness and Modernism: The Literary Career of John Edgar Wideman. Few can come away from their reading of Black Male Fiction and the Legacy of Caliban unchanged. Some will come unhinged. Coleman’s work is a challenge to what we think we know of postmodernity, of African American writing, or male texts. —Aldon Lynn Nielsen One of the few studies devoted to contemporary black male fiction. —Choice One of the first books devoted to the contemporary fiction of African American men and seeks to broaden and complicate our understanding of black masculinity. —South Atlantic Review Coleman offers compelling, original analyses of a body of frequently overlooked and critically neglected works. That many of the works are by some of the best known black male writers of our time simply underscores the timeliness of Coleman’s study. —Southern Literary Journal The quality of this book far exceeds the platitudes that we normally reserve for the very best work in the field: Phenomenal? Yes. Engaging? Quite. Seminal? For certain. Distinguished? Very possibly the most distinguished work on this subject to have come forth this century. —Warren Carsonhttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_comparative_literature/1007/thumbnail.jp

State Energy Cartels

Fracking has made America the center of global oil production and the engine of the world’s economy. But haste makes waste. America’s new oil wells are releasing natural gas as well, which is prized as a clean and reliable fuel around the world, but must be simply burned off or “flared” if there are no pipelines to bring it to the customers that need it. The pace of the oil boom, and the challenges of building new pipe-lines have forced oil companies to flare staggering quantities of natural gas. Texas and North Dakota are now flaring—that is, wasting—more gas than many states or even nations consume. This Article shows that to stop this economic and environmental waste, states must develop a new approach to antitrust law. It makes the case for state energy cartels.One of the few consensus grounds for regulation is combating market power—preventing dominant suppliers from increasing their profits by selling less at higher prices. States break up producer cartels so that competition provides consumers with lower prices. But what happens when a state’s interest coincides with producers rather than consumers? The economic health of major energy exporters depends on the price of the products they export. That is, these states, provinces, and countries can benefit by increasing the price of the oil and gas. For the first half of the twentieth century, the United States was the world’s premier oil exporter; during that time, U.S. states cooperated as a de facto cartel to ensure higher oil prices. When other countries overtook the U.S. as the world’s top oil producers, they formed the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to play a similar role.This article explains how state cartels offer the best solution to the flaring crisis and a unique opportunity for productive global cooperation to address climate change. It shows how states can slow production, protect the environment, and increase their industries’ profits by adapting and perfecting tools that the United States stumbled upon in the first half-century of oil production. And it shows how these tools can be tailored to protect consumers, industry, and the environment

The Peterson Case and Its Impact on the Rules in Ben Nevis

This article revisits and builds upon Professor Prebble\u27s 2006 book chapter The Peterson Case and its Impact on the Rules in BNZ Investments Ltd and Cecil Bros , considering the ways in which the Peterson case has influenced the leading 2009 New Zealand tax avoidance case of Ben Nevis. The article argues that Ben Nevis actually follows Peterson in two ways. First, it adopts the analysis of both the majority and the minority judgments in Peterson to the effect that the general anti-avoidance provision only applies when the purpose of the particular provision has been thwarted. Secondly, it uses the minority\u27s less judicial approach in considering whether the purpose of the specific provision has been complied with or not. The minority allowed a greater sweep of material to be relevant and inform that decision than the majority did. The majority looked only to the contractual rights and obligations created

Paying for Energy Peaks: Learning from Texas\u27 February 2021 Power Crisis

From February 14–19, 2021, winter storm Uri blanketed Texas with extreme cold. Tragically, the severe temperatures overwhelmed the state’s power system. Texas’ power grid ended up more than 20 Gigawatts short of the electricity Texans needed 2 – more power than all of California produces on an average day. Over two-hundred lives were lost3 and an estimated $295 billion in damage resulted.4 Yet many had long regarded Texas’ electric power system, and its regulation, as a model for others. What happened? That question is the focus of this article. This article first provides an overview of the severe power outages in February 2021 and the regulation of Texas’ electric power system, explaining why Texas is on the forefront of challenges that will grow more prominent as the world transitions to cleaner energy. Next, it discusses competing electric power business models and their regulation, including why many had long viewed Texas as a model of wise electricity regulation, and why the problems revealed by winter storm Uri will only grow more pressing for not just Texas but the entire world as it transitions to more reliance on electricity and a power grid supported by natural gas and renewables. It concludes by discussing Texas’ path forward and the broader lessons of this crisis for business lawyers and others. The tremendous economic losses of this episode attest to the importance of business lawyers having a basic understanding of their clients’ energy dependencies, the risks that significant power problems could present to their businesses, and the ability to advise them as they seek to mitigate such vulnerabilitie

Calibrating Liquefied Natural Gas Export Life Cycle Assessment: Accounting for Legal Boundaries and Post-Export Markets

The climate impact of liquefied natural gas (LNG) export from North America is one of the most pressing questions for Canadian and world energy policy today. This paper performs the first life cycle assessment (LCA) of the greenhouse gas emissions from LNG exports from Canada, assuming that importing countries use the natural gas for electricity generation. It shows that the climate impact of LNG depends on where it is sent. If LNG from Canada displaces electricity in coal-dependent countries, it will likely lower global greenhouse gas emissions. If it displaces electricity from countries that rely on low carbon sources such as hydroelectricity and nuclear power, it will likely increase global emissions. A broad suite of policy and regulatory measures is discussed for reducing greenhouse gas emissions due to LNG export, from life cycle regulation to facility-level emissions management

Personhood, consciousness, and god : how to be a proper pantheist

© Springer Nature B.V. 2018In this paper I develop a theory of personhood which leaves open the possibility of construing the universe as a person. If successful, it removes one bar to endorsing pantheism. I do this by examining a rising school of thought on personhood, on which persons, or selves, are understood as identical to episodes of consciousness. Through a critique of this experiential approach to personhood, I develop a theory of self as constituted of qualitative mental contents, but where these contents are also capable of unconscious existence. On this theory, though we can be conscious of our selves, consciousness turns out to be inessential to personhood. This move, I then argue, provides resources for responding to the pantheist’s problem of God’s person.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Decay of Metastable Topological Defects

We systematically analyze the decay of metastable topological defects that arise from the spontaneous breakdown of gauge or global symmetries. Quantum-mechanical tunneling rates are estimated for a variety of decay processes. The decay rate for a global string, vortex, domain wall, or kink is typically suppressed compared to the decay rate for its gauged counterpart. We also discuss the decay of global texture, and of semilocal and electroweak strings.Comment: 43 pages, harvmac, HUTP-92/A018, CALT-68-178