African Diasporas and the Atlantic

As a cursory consultation of any library catalog quickly confirms, the African diaspora as both concept and field of study is overwhelmingly defined by Atlantic scholarship. This is paradoxical in two respects. The Atlantic is one of three broad regions of African dispersion outside the continent. Between 650 and 1900 C.E., a comparable number of sub-Saharan Africans left their homes for destinations in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean as they did into the Atlantic (see table 1).1Second,African diaspora, a relatively new concept, is widely thought to have been introduced into academic discourse through a conference paper delivered in 1965 by George Shepperson.2The conference in question united scholars of African history to consider intellectual problems in their fledgling field. It was held at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, a port on the Swahili coast of the Indian Ocean (map 1). From antiquity to the nineteenth century, Africans entered the Indian Ocean and its Red Sea extension as slaves from the continent’s eastern seaboard. First articulated at an African center of research and among scholars who taught about the departure of slaves into the Indian Ocean from their own shores, Shepperson’s notion of African diaspora found its intellectual home an ocean away, in Atlantic America

The politics of punishment in colonial Mauritius, 1766-1887

The history of imprisonment in British colonial Mauritius is intertwined with its political economy, most especially the relationship between metropolitan government and plantation owners. Whether labour was predominantly enslaved, apprenticed or indentured, incarceration was part of a broader process through which the regulation of the colonial workforce was taken from the private to the public sphere and became associated with economic development. Nevertheless, prisoners both challenged and used prison regimes as vehicles for the improvement of their lives. Mauritian jails were intensely political arenas in which the changing nature of colonial relations and the regulation of labour was both expressed and contested

The SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Quasar Target Selection for Data Release Nine

The SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), a five-year spectroscopic survey of 10,000 deg^2, achieved first light in late 2009. One of the key goals of BOSS is to measure the signature of baryon acoustic oscillations in the distribution of Ly-alpha absorption from the spectra of a sample of ~150,000 z>2.2 quasars. Along with measuring the angular diameter distance at z\approx2.5, BOSS will provide the first direct measurement of the expansion rate of the Universe at z > 2. One of the biggest challenges in achieving this goal is an efficient target selection algorithm for quasars over 2.2 < z < 3.5, where their colors overlap those of stars. During the first year of the BOSS survey, quasar target selection methods were developed and tested to meet the requirement of delivering at least 15 quasars deg^-2 in this redshift range, out of 40 targets deg^-2. To achieve these surface densities, the magnitude limit of the quasar targets was set at g <= 22.0 or r<=21.85. While detection of the BAO signature in the Ly-alpha absorption in quasar spectra does not require a uniform target selection, many other astrophysical studies do. We therefore defined a uniformly-selected subsample of 20 targets deg^-2, for which the selection efficiency is just over 50%. This "CORE" subsample will be fixed for Years Two through Five of the survey. In this paper we describe the evolution and implementation of the BOSS quasar target selection algorithms during the first two years of BOSS operations. We analyze the spectra obtained during the first year. 11,263 new z>2.2 quasars were spectroscopically confirmed by BOSS. Our current algorithms select an average of 15 z > 2.2 quasars deg^-2 from 40 targets deg^-2 using single-epoch SDSS imaging. Multi-epoch optical data and data at other wavelengths can further improve the efficiency and completeness of BOSS quasar target selection. [Abridged]Comment: 33 pages, 26 figures, 12 tables and a whole bunch of quasars. Submitted to Ap

The Environmental Dependence of the Relations between Stellar Mass, Structure, Star Formation and Nuclear Activity in Galaxies

We use a complete sample of galaxies drawn from the SDSS to study how structure, star formation and nuclear activity depend on local density and on stellar mass. Local density is estimated by counting galaxies above a fixed absolute magnitude limit within cylinders 2 Mpc in projected radius and +-500 km/s in depth. The stellar mass distribution of galaxies shifts by nearly a factor of two towards higher masses between low and high density regions. At fixed stellar mass, both star formation and nuclear activity depend strongly on local density, while structural parameters such as size and concentration are almost independent of it. The galaxy property most sensitive to environment is specific star formation rate. For galaxies with stellar masses less than 3 x 10^10 M_sun, the median SFR/M* decreases by more than a factor of 10 from low to high densities. This decrease is less marked for massive galaxies. At fixed stellar mass, twice as many galaxies host AGN with strong [OIII] emission in low density regions as in high. Massive galaxies in low-density environments also contain more dust. We have analyzed correlations between spectroscopic indicators that probe SFH on different timescales (D4000, Hdelta_A and SFR/M*). The correlations do not depend on environment, suggesting that the decrease in star formation has ocurred over long (>1 Gyr) timescales. Since structure does not depend on environment for more massive galaxies, trends in recent SFH, dust and AGN for these systems cannot be driven by processes that alter structure, e.g. mergers. The SFH-density correlation is strongest for small scale (< 1 Mpc) estimates of local density. Finally, we highlight a striking similarity between changes in the galaxy population as a function of density and as a function of redshift and we interpret this using N-body simulations.Comment: submitted to MNRAS, 35 page

The role of APOBEC3B in lung tumor evolution and targeted cancer therapy resistance

In this study, the impact of the apolipoprotein B mRNA-editing catalytic subunit-like (APOBEC) enzyme APOBEC3B (A3B) on epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR)-driven lung cancer was assessed. A3B expression in EGFR mutant (EGFRmut) non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) mouse models constrained tumorigenesis, while A3B expression in tumors treated with EGFR-targeted cancer therapy was associated with treatment resistance. Analyses of human NSCLC models treated with EGFR-targeted therapy showed upregulation of A3B and revealed therapy-induced activation of nuclear factor kappa B (NF-κB) as an inducer of A3B expression. Significantly reduced viability was observed with A3B deficiency, and A3B was required for the enrichment of APOBEC mutation signatures, in targeted therapy-treated human NSCLC preclinical models. Upregulation of A3B was confirmed in patients with NSCLC treated with EGFR-targeted therapy. This study uncovers the multifaceted roles of A3B in NSCLC and identifies A3B as a potential target for more durable responses to targeted cancer therapy.</p

Malagasy at the Mascarenes

European expansion from the fifteenth century produced much writing on, and sometimes in, non-European languages that served a broad array of imperial interests. Most European ventures into what one scholar has termed “colonial linguistics” were based on investigations among speakers of native tongues in the regions in which those speakers normally resided, twining language studies with observed “native” cultural qualities and setting out territories of colonial interest defined by local language and culture.1 Fewer colonial linguists ventured into plural societies to study the linguae francae of trade and labor that enabled communication across broad cultural and language differences, in part because such zones were considered dangerous and unstable, or lacking in mother tongues. Fewer still elected destinations of forced migration such as slave societies or freedmen’s towns and villages to examine the mother tongues of persons who had come coercively from afar, though many such settings in certain periods offered a rich menu of languages for study.2 1 Joseph Errington, “Colonial Linguistics,” Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (2001): 19–39. 2 Among the works of this nature are Alonso de Sandoval, Naturaleza policia sagrada y profana, costumbres y ritos, disciplina i cathecismo evange´lico de todos Etiopes (Sevilla, 1627); Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle, Polyglotta Africana: Or, a Comparative Vocabulary of Nearly Three Hundred Words and Phrases in More than One Hundred Distinct African Languages (London, 1854).Research was generously funded by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and a Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship administered by the American Council of Learned Societies

African Diasporas and the Atlantic

As a cursory consultation of any library catalog quickly confirms, the African diaspora as both concept and field of study is overwhelmingly defined by Atlantic scholarship. This is paradoxical in two respects. The Atlantic is one of three broad regions of African dispersion outside the continent. Between 650 and 1900 C.E., a comparable number of sub-Saharan Africans left their homes for destinations in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean as they did into the Atlantic (see table 1).1Second,African diaspora, a relatively new concept, is widely thought to have been introduced into academic discourse through a conference paper delivered in 1965 by George Shepperson.2The conference in question united scholars of African history to consider intellectual problems in their fledgling field. It was held at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, a port on the Swahili coast of the Indian Ocean (map 1). From antiquity to the nineteenth century, Africans entered the Indian Ocean and its Red Sea extension as slaves from the continent’s eastern seaboard. First articulated at an African center of research and among scholars who taught about the departure of slaves into the Indian Ocean from their own shores, Shepperson’s notion of African diaspora found its intellectual home an ocean away, in Atlantic America

ENSLAVED MALAGASY AND ‘LE TRAVAIL DE LA PAROLE' IN THE PRE-REVOLUTIONARY MASCARENES

ABSTRACT: Malagasy speakers probably formed the single largest native speech community among slaves dispersed into the western Indian Ocean between 1500 and 1900. In the eighteenth-century Mascarenes, Malagasy parlers (dialects) served as a contact language, understood both by persons born in Madagascar and by those with no direct ties to the island. Catholic missionaries working in Bourbon and I ˆ le de France frequently evangelized among sick and newly disembarked Malagasy slaves in their own tongues, employing servile interpreters and catechists from their ecclesiastical plantations as intermediaries in their ‘work of the word’. Evangelistic style was multilingual, in both French and Malagasy, and largely verbal, but was also informed by Malagasy vernacular manuscripts of Church doctrine set in Roman characters. The importance of Malagasy in the Mascarenes sets the linguistic environment of the islands off in distinctive ways from those of Atlantic slave societies and requires scholars to rethink the language and culture history of the western Indian Ocean islands

Colonies Lost: God, Hunger, and Conflict in Anosy (Madagascar) to 1674

A fleet of thirteen Portuguese vessels under the command of Pedro Álvares Cabral set sail from Lisbon for the East Indies just two years after Vasco da Gama fi rst rounded the Cape of Good Hope. In late May 1500, inclement weather at the Cape separated the vessel commanded by Diego Diaz from the others, blowing it well south of its intended course. Steering north to regain their way, Diaz and crew caught sight of land on 10 August along the coast of Anosy, Madagascar’s southeast extremity (fi g. 1). The day was the Feast of São Lourenço, and Diaz named the big island (Madagascar) for European cartography after the feast.1 As far as it is known, this was the fi rst sighting of Madagascar by seafarers hailing directly from the Atlantic via the Cape route. European sailors and mapmakers continued to identify Madagascar as São Lourenço (Portuguese) and Saint-Laurent (French) for centuries to come. From the early decades of the sixteenth century to the French abandonment of Madagascar in 1674, Anosy in southeast Madagascar was an important site of European-Malagasy interaction. The meeting grounds of Anosy played a signifi cant role in the early modern history of the southwest Indian Ocean, much as the Cape of Good Hope or Kilwa and Mombasa did, but they are poorly known outside a close circle of francophone Madagascar experts. At the same time little secondary literature on Anosy and its Europeans in any language is broad and comparative in outlook, setting them in wider and interconnected historical narratives of the region.2 ******************** 1. Alfred Grandidier, ed., Collection des ouvrages anciens concernant Madagascar, 9 vols. (Paris: Comité de Madagascar, 1903– 20), 1:3–5. 2. An exception is Mike Parker Pearson, “Close Encounters of the Worst Kind: Malagasy Resistance and Colonial Disasters in Southern Madagascar,” World Archaeology 28 (1997): 393–417. This work covers a broad set of encounters between Europeans and the inhabitants of southern Madagascar to the seventeenth century, mainly from an archaeological perspective. Anosy was one of several areas of European interest in Madagascar before the late seventeenth century, others being in the west, particularly the Bay of Boina and Saint Augustine Bay, which are not covered in this article. For these, see Pearson, “Close Encounters,” the articles by Vincent Belrose-Huyghues cited in later notes, and William Foster, “An English Settlement in Madagascar in 1645–6,” English Historical Review 27 (1912): 239–50