Legacies of a Past Modernism Discourses of Development and the Shaping of Centralized Electricity Infastructures in Late- and Postcolonial Tanzania

As the UN has declared the years 2014-2024 the “Decade of Sustainable Energy for All”, countries in Sub-Saharan Africa struggle with the transition towards more sustainable and more inclusive energy infrastructures. In many rural areas, electrification rates remain as low as 1-2%. For many countries, one of the main barriers for rural electrification is the legacy of a model of top-down planning, large-scale power generation and a centralized topology of the electricity infrastructure. Nonetheless, historiography on electricity infrastructures in Africa is nearly non-existent. At the example of Tanzania this paper shows, that the centralized power models which dominate the continent today were shaped by modernization and development discourses during the late colonial and post-independence period. Because of its particular characteristics, electricity lent itself perfectly to the goal of making development measurable — a goal which was essential to a “high modernist” vision of development, advocated by new nation states as well as international funders. The paper illustrates how large hydropower projects proved successful in expanding generation capacities and urban electrification rates, but failed in providing electricity to rural areas and created pathdependencies which have led to dead ends in the last 20 years

The Jordanian deformation of su(2) and Clebsch-Gordan coefficients

Representation theory for the Jordanian quantum algebra U=U_h(sl(2)) is developed using a nonlinear relation between its generators and those of sl(2). Closed form expressions are given for the action of the generators of U on the basis vectors of finite dimensional irreducible representations. In the tensor product of two such representations, a new basis is constructed on which the generators of U have a simple action. Using this basis, a general formula is obtained for the Clebsch-Gordan coefficients of U. It is shown that the Clebsch-Gordan matrix is essentially the product of a triangular matrix with an su(2) Clebsch-Gordan matrix. Using this fact, some remarkable properties of these Clebsch-Gordan coefficients are derived.Comment: 8 pages, LaTeX. Presented at the 6th International Colloquium Quantum Groups and Integrable Systems, Prague, June 199

Agaat's Law. Reflections on Law and Literature with Reference to Marlene Van Niekerk's novel Agaat

This essay explores the relation between law and literature from the literary Marxist position that Jean-Luc Nancy develops in his work La Communauté Désoeuvrée. It does so with specific reference to Marlene van Niekerk’s novel Agaat and to the Lacanian problematic of imaginary selves caught up in the confines of their speculative or mirroring images of others. It takes leave of approaches to law and literature studies such as Martha Nussbaum’s in terms of which literature can be invoked to edify or improve the law. It argues that law and literature can both benefit from a comparative exchange, provided this exchange takes seriously the fundamental and irreducible tension and hiatus between characteristically “legal” and characteristically “literary” discourses