Sex, the picaresque and the glamorous revolution Nadine Gordimer's A Sport of Nature

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 3 March 1997Since South Africa's 1994 elections, a number of cultural works have come out which incorporate the build-up to social transformation as their subject matter. Nadine Gordimer's most recent novel to date, None to Accompany Me (1994), explores the politics of negotiation which led to South Africa's first democratic election as well as the optimisms and tensions of the years following Nelson Mandela's release from prison. In this most recent novel, Gordimer's commitment to the new social order as led by the African National Congress is both rearticulated and probed. The narrative deals with the daily work of politics and establishes a complex though localised focus on South Africa's recent moment. In the light of this recent novel by Gordimer, it is interesting to reread an earlier work by the author where a less bounded, more Utopian vision is present. A Sport of Nature (1987) offers a grand, energetic journey into an imagined African history as the backdrop against which South Africa's particular trajectory (past and future) may be read. This novel speaks of Gordimer's political imagination at its most unfettered, it spells out the wish that her subsequent novels put into more concrete and localised terms. My concern is to assess Gordimer's political project in A Sport of Nature in the light of the apparently "Utopian" versions of female sexuality and identity she here puts forward. Through the central figure of Hillela, especially, aspects of Gordimer's overall vision can be gauged. A Sport of Nature has provoked a high degree of interpretive divergency. Some critics have hailed it as Gordimer's "most optimistic" novel (Cooper 1990: 68) in the politics it offers, others as her "most deeply cynical" (Krauss 1 987: 33). Much critical focus has centred around the primary figure of Hillela, and again, opinion is strikingly divided: is Hillela an inspirational new type of political being, a feminist's nightmare, a modern female picaro, or all/none of these things

Cumulative effect of Weibel-type instabilities in counterstreaming plasmas with non-Maxwellian anisotropies

Counterstreaming plasma structures are widely present in laboratory experiments and astrophysical systems, and they are investigated either to prevent unstable modes arising in beam-plasma experiments or to prove the existence of large scale magnetic fields in astrophysical objects. Filamentation instability arises in a counterstreaming plasma and is responsible for the magnetization of the plasma. Filamentationally unstable mode is described by assuming that each of the counterstreaming plasmas has an isotropic Lorentzian (kappa) distribution. In this case, the filamentation instability growth rate can reach a maximum value markedly larger than that for a a plasma with a Maxwellian distribution function. This behaviour is opposite to what was observed for the Weibel instability growth rate in a bi-kappa plasma, which is always smaller than that obtained for a bi-Maxwellian plasma. The approach is further generalized for a counterstreaming plasma with a bi-kappa temperature anisotropy. In this case, the filamentation instability growth rate is enhanced by the Weibel effect when the plasma is hotter in the streaming direction, and the growth rate becomes even larger. These effects improve significantly the efficiency of the magnetic field generation, and provide further support for the potential role of the Weibel-type instabilities in the fast magnetization scenarios

On the entropy of plasmas described with regularized κ\kappa-distributions

In classical thermodynamics the entropy is an extensive quantity, i.e.\ the sum of the entropies of two subsystems in equilibrium with each other is equal to the entropy of the full system consisting of the two subsystems. The extensitivity of entropy has been questioned in the context of a theoretical foundation for the so-called $\kappa$-distributions, which describe plasma constituents with power-law velocity distributions. We demonstrate here, by employing the recently introduced {\it regularized $\kappa$-distributions}, that entropy can be defined as an extensive quantity even for such power-law-like distributions that truncate exponentially.Comment: Preprint accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Size Effect in Market-wide Liquidity Commonality: Evidence from the Indian Stock Market

Liquidity commonality and the co-movements in trading costs related to such commonality have remarkable implications in market microstructure. Analyzing and identifying such commonality will enable the investor and policy maker to discover evidence regarding the inventory risks and asymmetric information in uencing individual securities’ liquidity. Thus, this study aims at documenting the liquidity commonality and measuring its extent in the Indian stock market. Employing fourteen liquidity measures a ributed to the cost, quantity, time, and multidimensional aspects of liquidity, it empirically proves the existence of co-movements among market-wide liquidity and the individual securities’ liquidity. The study also shows the presence of a size effect in liquidity commonality in Indian stock market. It is found that the slope coefficient indicating the interface between market-wide liquidity and individual securities’ liquidity generally increases with size

Non-ideal particle distributions from kinetic freeze out models

In fluid dynamical models the freeze out of particles across a three dimensional space-time hypersurface is discussed. The calculation of final momentum distribution of emitted particles is described for freeze out surfaces, with both space-like and time-like normals, taking into account conservation laws across the freeze out discontinuity

Long Term Variceal Sclerotherapy: Is Endoscopic Sclerosis a Unique Therapeutic Approach and a True Alternative to Surgery?

Endoscopic sclerotherapy has been used to control acute variceal haemorrhage which persists despite conservative therapy, prevent recurrent variceal haemorrhage in patients with a history of oesophageal haemorrhage, and to prevent a haemorrhage in patients with oesophageal varices who never bled