3,987 research outputs found
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 -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 -distributions, which describe plasma
constituents with power-law velocity distributions. We demonstrate here, by
employing the recently introduced {\it regularized -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.
Biomarker and pollen approach to reconstruct Late Holocene climate and environmental history in western Sri Lnka
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
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