The non-magical realism of Jacques Roumain's Gouverneurs de la Rosée

Gouverneurs de la rosée has received more critical attention than any other Haitian novel, and much of that attention has been focused on the "realist" credentials of that novel. That realism has been variously defined—from those who have read the novel as a thinly disguised Marxist treatise to those who see in it a kind of fictionalized ethnography, allowing the reader a glimpse of the "real" daily life of the peasants of the mornes.1 Not all such judgements have been favorable, and it is remarkable how many readings of the novel excoriate it for its failure to live up to the aims that they, in fact, ascribe to it. Thus, the novel has been criticized for purporting to address the real problems of the peasants while ignoring the documented historical travails of analogous peasant communities in the Plaine du Cul-de-Sac in the 1930s; Roumain has been accused of eluding the contradictions inherent in applying a Marxist revolutionary theory to an undeveloped agrarian society by transforming his hero, Manuel, from militant into messiah; ethnologists have drawn attention to Roumain's supposed ignorance of the informal laws of land tenure and succession observed in Haitian rural communities and of the way that Vodou was actually practiced by the peasants.

Peremptory Challenges: Preserving An Unequal Allocation and the Potential Promise of Progressive Prosecution

In the United States, the relative allocation of peremptory challenges afforded to the defense and prosecution is at once in a state of paralysis and flux. The federal system maintains an unequal allocation of peremptory challenges between the defense and prosecution in noncapital offenses, while many states have moved toward equalization of the number of peremptory challenges afforded to each side over the last few decades. Currently, only five states and the federal system have retained an allocation of peremptory challenges that affords the defense a greater number of peremptory challenges in noncapital offenses. Further, only nine states and the federal system maintain an unequal allocation of peremptory challenges in any capacity. This inconsistency strikes a chord fundamental to the fairness of our justice system, especially in light of the Supreme Court’s failure to eliminate the discriminatory exercise of the peremptory challenge in Batson. This Comment argues that, at this time, the federal system and remaining states should not move toward equalizing the number of peremptory challenges afforded to the defense and prosecution because allocating a greater number of peremptory challenges to the defense best serves theoretical fairness in the justice system, including maintaining the community’s perception the justice system’s fairness. Additionally, allocating a greater number of peremptory challenges to the defense serves actual fairness by reducing opportunities for prosecutors to use peremptory challenges in a discriminatory manner. Finally, this Comment takes the novel approach of considering how the “progressive prosecution” movement may justify movement toward equalization in the future, by shifting the community’s perception of fairness and by increasing actual fairness in the exercise of peremptory challenges

ADAPTATION AND SENSITIZATION TO PROTEOTOXIC STRESS

Although severe stress can elicit toxicity, mild stress often elicits adaptations. Here we review the literature on stress-induced adaptations versus stress sensitization in models of neurodegenerative diseases. We also describe our recent findings that chronic proteotoxic stress can elicit adaptations if the dose is low but that high-dose proteotoxic stress sensitizes cells to subsequent challenges. In these experiments, long-term, low-dose proteasome inhibition elicited protection in a superoxide dismutase-dependent manner. In contrast, acute, high-dose proteotoxic stress sensitized cells to subsequent proteotoxic challenges by eliciting catastrophic loss of glutathione. However, even in the latter model of synergistic toxicity, several defensive proteins were upregulated by severe proteotoxicity. This led us to wonder whether high-dose proteotoxic stress can elicit protection against subsequent challenges in astrocytes, a cell type well known for their resilience. In support of this new hypothesis, we found that the astrocytes that survived severe proteotoxicity became harder to kill. The adaptive mechanism was glutathione dependent. If these findings can be generalized to the human brain, similar endogenous adaptations may help explain why neurodegenerative diseases are so delayed in appearance and so slow to progress. In contrast, sensitization to severe stress may explain why defenses eventually collapse in vulnerable neurons

Toward a borderless, decolonized, socially just, and inclusive Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

In the context of global curriculum transformation and from a global South perspective, this article explores the imposed and self-created borders that continue to “discipline” us into reproducing scholarly processes, practices, and traditions that privilege dominant forms of knowledge making and knowing in teaching and learning. Drawing on Africa as a case study to explore a framework for thinking outside borders, the author invites the reader to embrace a global social imagination that disrupts and transcends the epistemic, social, and cultural borders designed to produce knowledge that is ahistorical and decontextualized. Using a social mapping of how we thrive on neatly delineated borders that detach the known from the knower by marginalizing or delegitimizing knowledges of the Other, this article, which draws on an earlier version presented as a keynote at the 16th annual conference of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, presents a theory of change geared toward borderless, decolonized, socially just, and inclusive pedagogy and scholarship

Using an Effort Praise Intervention to Increase Achievement and Persistence in Reading

Effort praise, a type of general praise, leads to positive effects, such as higher achievement and persistence, when compared to ability praise and especially after failure outcomes. Effort praise focuses on reinforcing children for how hard they work on a task, as opposed to their outcome or ability level. The current study examined the effects of effort praise among at-risk first graders involved in a reading intervention. It was expected that the effort praise group would experience greater achievement and persistence compared to a control group who received non-attributional praise during the same reading intervention, but these hypotheses were not statistically supported. Possible reasons why effort praise was not found to produce greater results in this study are discussed