[Review] Nigel C. Gibson, ed. (2011) Living Fanon: global perspectives

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‘DestroyedMichygen’: re-routing the postnational in contemporary diaspirant fiction

This paper explores three novels published in the Obama era: NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names (2013), Okey Ndibe's Foreign Gods, Inc. (2014), and Dinaw Mengestu's How to Read the Air (2010). It considers how writing both by and on Obama illuminates some of the central preoccupations of what I am choosing to call these “diaspirant” texts. The paper unpacks the paradigm of “diaspirancy,” probing both its utility and limitations when it comes to a new generation of diasporic writing, often labeled African and American. This allows me to consider the extent to which all three of my contextually specific novels are both invoking and seeking to interrogate certain discourses of American exceptionalism amplified in the context of Obama's presidency. Similarly, the paper argues that, while the postnational label is used in indiscriminate and often exclusive ways when it comes to African contexts, all three of my chosen writers consider how it might speak to the peculiar contours of twenty-first-century America. These are thrown into starker relief when viewed through the migrant lens so central to Bulawayo, Ndibe, and Mengestu, as well as much of Obama's rhetoric before, during, and after his time in office

An IN SITU Measurement System for GARP Using Ballons, Buoys and a Satellite

The goals of the Global Atmospheric Research Program are to increase our understanding of the general circulation of the atmosphere and to develop bases for extended weather prediction. Data to fulfill these goals may come in part from a lowcost random access doppler system using orbiting satellites to recover meteorological and oceanographic data from freely drifting balloons and buoys. Such a system will be used in a scientific study in the tropics and southern hemisphere in 1974 and will involve the Nimbus satellite and some 300 constant-level balloons

An In Situ Measurement System for the Global Atmospheric Research 3-19 Program Using Balloons, Buoys and a Satellite

The Global Atmospheric Research Program (GARP) is an international cooperative program whose ultimate goals are to increase our understanding of the general circulation of the atmosphere and to develop physical and mathematical bases for extended weather prediction. GARP was established in response to United National resolutions of 1960 and 1961; most of the GARP research efforts are scheduled for the decade of the 1970s. GARP encompasses two separate but closely related communities: the World Meterorological Organization (WMO), made up of national meteorological agencies and services and including most of the observing, telecommunications , and automatic data processing facilities now obtaining weather data; and the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU), a research community composed of university groups and various research organizations and institutes operated by agencies other than the national meteorological services. This latter group devotes a large portion of its effort to fundamental research problems of the atmosphere. A primary element of a research program is obtaining data. The data necessary for GARP will be collected from a composite of many systems, some of them already in operation. Meteorological satellites will be primary tools, and data from them will be supplemented by shipboard and aircraft observations, groundbased rawinsondes, and regular weather station data

Floods, fortresses and cabin fever: worlding “Domeland” security in Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun and The Circle

This article offers a contrapuntal reading of Dave Eggers’s journalistic account Zeitoun and his novel The Circle. It considers how and why both are preoccupied with the kinds of (in)security discourses, stretching from Hurricane Katrina through the implosion of Syria and into imagined futures, that have shaped and continue to shape our cultural and geopolitical imaginaries. The article argues that Zeitoun and The Circle develop the transnational commitments of Eggers’s earlier work in particular ways. In so doing, both call upon their readers to challenge the reductive, invariably taxonomical rhetoric associated with the kinds of security questions that proliferate in the aftermath of events such as 9/11 and Katrina. By exploring what Rob Nixon calls a “transnational ethics of place” in these two texts, Eggers interrogates paradigms such as “development,” as well as affiliated ideas of US exceptionalism. In their formally and conceptually distinctive ways, I argue that both Zeitoun and The Circle ask readers to imagine the possibilities of “worlding” these discourses in more generative terms. By recalibrating some of the defining security questions of our time, Eggers invites us to conceptualize and engage with them more fully