302 research outputs found
Gods of physical violence, stopping at nothing: Masculinity, religion, and art in the work of Zora Neale Hurston
Get PDFThis essay examines the ways in which discourses concerning masculinity, religion, and aesthetics converge in the work of Zora Neal Hurston. This convergence participates in a much larger confluence of these three discourses during the Harlem Renaissance. The migration of hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the rural south to the urban north provoked massive changes in almost every aspect of African American life. It was a period when, in Du Bois\u27s words, African American men felt their best chance to attain self-conscious manhood. In fact, definitions and ideals of manhood were thrown into flux, and a newly developing secular intelligentsia found itself in an uneasy and sometimes competitive relationship with older models of black masculinity associated with the black preacher. While cosmopolitan authors like Du Bois sometimes created images of black manhood that stood in continuity with but were not contained by the institutional power of the black preacher, writers of the Harlem Renaissance often pictured the preacher of the old south as corrupt images of failed masculinity, embodiments of an Old Negro culture that had to be transcended to realize New Negro possibilities. Zora Neal Hurston\u27s work tends toward imagining Afro-Christian culture as a failure and often posits that failure in images of failed masculinity. Indeed, the weaknesses of this culture most often inhibit rather than contribute to the development of a vibrant literary and artistic culture. It is true that some characters, such as John Pearson of Jonah\u27s Gourd Vine, approach the admirable status of a kind of virile preacher-poet. Nevertheless, Pearson\u27s best attributes seem to come from something other than his status as a Christian, and in fact the church seems finally unable to accommodate the sources of his physical and imaginative strength. Indeed, ultimately Pearson seems to bear out Hurston\u27s declaration that Negro is not a Christian really, that instead the sources of African American imagination must be found more clearly in folklore and in religious practices associated with voodoo and other neo-African religions. Consistently throughout her autobiographical, folkloric, and fictional writing, she derides Christianity as a fainting and unsexed religion, one without the imaginative resources to produce great literature. Ironically, then, Hurston invokes a form of explicitly anti-Christian primitivism as a model of artistic excellence for the cosmopolitan and modern New Negro. © The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture
The role of a digital engineering platform in appropriating the creation of new work-related mind-set and organisational discourse in a large multi-national company
Get PDFYesThis paper reports on a case study involving a strategic and innovative approach to creation of an in-house multifaceted digital engineering platform (the DEP) in overcoming a number of organisational problems at a multinational engineering company. The DEP was to be used strategically for simplifying the operational complexity and to create and appropriate new work-related mind-set and new organisational discourse to achieve homogenous working across the organisation, which is a huge challenge. The need for this system emerged from the need to resolve many organisational services related problems that carried phenomenal amount of processes, health and safety risks and to regulate, and, control the running of engineering project. Research data were collected using a longitudinal case study approach over a period of six months. In order to make sense of how the DEP helped the organisation, the study used certain elements of Extended Structuration Theory as a lens to assess the case study. This research discovered that the DEP succeeded in creating and appropriating work-related mind-set and organisational discourse. It also had real influence on working processes and employees at all levels while encouraging transparency, responsiveness, agility and accountability. It continues to help the organisation to govern, manage and maintain good standard of service but many barriers still remain
A novel framework for making dominant point detection methods non-parametric
Get PDFMost dominant point detection methods require heuristically chosen control parameters. One of the commonly used control parameter is maximum deviation. This paper uses a theoretical bound of the maximum deviation of pixels obtained by digitization of a line segment for constructing a general framework to make most dominant point detection methods non-parametric. The derived analytical bound of the maximum deviation can be used as a natural bench mark for the line fitting algorithms and thus dominant point detection methods can be made parameter-independent and non-heuristic. Most methods can easily incorporate the bound. This is demonstrated using three categorically different dominant point detection methods. Such non-parametric approach retains the characteristics of the digital curve while providing good fitting performance and compression ratio for all the three methods using a variety of digital, non-digital, and noisy curves
Tephrochronology and its application: A review
Get PDFTephrochronology (from tephra, Gk ‘ashes’) is a unique stratigraphic method for linking, dating, and synchronizing geological, palaeoenvironmental, or archaeological sequences or events. As well as utilising the Law of Superposition, tephrochronology in practise requires tephra deposits to be characterized (or ‘fingerprinted’) using physical properties evident in the field together with those obtained from laboratory analyses. Such analyses include mineralogical examination (petrography) or geochemical analysis of glass shards or crystals using an electron microprobe or other analytical tools including laser-ablation-based mass spectrometry or the ion microprobe. The palaeoenvironmental or archaeological context in which a tephra occurs may also be useful for correlational purposes. Tephrochronology provides greatest utility when a numerical age obtained for a tephra or cryptotephra is transferrable from one site to another using stratigraphy and by comparing and matching inherent compositional features of the deposits with a high degree of likelihood. Used this way, tephrochronology is an age-equivalent dating method that provides an exceptionally precise volcanic-event stratigraphy. Such age transfers are valid because the primary tephra deposits from an eruption essentially have the same short-lived age everywhere they occur, forming isochrons very soon after the eruption (normally within a year). As well as providing isochrons for palaeoenvironmental and archaeological reconstructions, tephras through their geochemical analysis allow insight into volcanic and magmatic processes, and provide a comprehensive record of explosive volcanism and recurrence rates in the Quaternary (or earlier) that can be used to establish time-space relationships of relevance to volcanic hazard analysis.
The basis and application of tephrochronology as a central stratigraphic and geochronological tool for Quaternary studies are presented and discussed in this review. Topics covered include principles of tephrochronology, defining isochrons, tephra nomenclature, mapping and correlating tephras from proximal to distal locations at metre- through to sub-millimetre-scale, cryptotephras, mineralogical and geochemical fingerprinting methods, numerical and statistical correlation techniques, and developments and applications in dating including the use of flexible depositional age-modelling techniques based on Bayesian statistics. Along with reference to wide-ranging examples and the identification of important recent advances in tephrochronology, such as the development of new geoanalytical approaches that enable individual small glass shards to be analysed near-routinely for major, trace, and rare-earth elements, potential problems such as miscorrelation, erroneous-age transfer, and tephra reworking and taphonomy (especially relating to cryptotephras) are also examined. Some of the challenges for future tephrochronological studies include refining geochemical analytical methods further, improving understanding of cryptotephra distribution and preservation patterns, improving age modelling including via new or enhanced radiometric or incremental techniques and Bayesian-derived models, evaluating and quantifying uncertainty in tephrochronology to a greater degree than at present, constructing comprehensive regional databases, and integrating tephrochronology with spatially referenced environmental and archaeometric data into 3-D reconstructions using GIS and geostatistics
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Quantifying volcanic ash dispersal and impact of the Campanian Ignimbrite super-eruption
Get PDF1] We apply a novel computational approach to assess, for the first time, volcanic ash dispersal during the Campanian Ignimbrite (Italy) super-eruption providing insights into eruption dynamics and the impact of this gigantic event. The method uses a 3D time-dependent computational ash dispersion model, a set of wind fields, and more than 100 thickness measurements of the CI tephra deposit. Results reveal that the CI eruption dispersed 250–300 km3 of ash over ∼3.7 million km2. The injection of such a large quantity of ash (and volatiles) into the atmosphere would have caused a volcanic winter during the Heinrich Event 4, the coldest and driest climatic episode of the Last Glacial period. Fluorine-bearing leachate from the volcanic ash and acid rain would have further affected food sources and severely impacted Late Middle-Early Upper Paleolithic groups in Southern and Eastern Europ
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