Re-writing the Bhabhian “Mimic Man”: Akin, the Posthuman Other in Octavia Butler’s Adulthood Rites

Cultural critics have sought to define the term posthuman1 as primarily a condition that does away with hierarchical forms of power and control. It recognizes a transformation of the human species into a subject position that moves from an oppositional politics of segregating the human “self” from the “other” to one of acknowledging the “other” as part of the human “self.” 2 With the advent of the posthuman condition comes the need to re-define human rights in a posthuman context. Octavia Butler’s science fiction novel Adulthood Rites3 introduces us to Oankali, gene-trading aliens who travel through space. They intercept and save the human species that is dying in a world ravaged by nuclear war. The Oankali mission of salvation has a hidden agenda,4 though: whoever opts to be saved needs to forgo the right to reproduce. Reproduction, in this new world where human beings are a salvaged species and not the predominant one, is on the terms laid out by the Oankali aliens. The terms of Oankali reproduction that start off with genetic modifications of the human Lilith, the Oankali nominated progenitor of the posthuman in Dawn, enforces the birth of a hybrid—a human-alien construct, Akin, who is related to both humans and aliens, the posthuman other. Built on a “postcolonial” definition of a “mimic man,”5 a product of what Bart Simon and Jill Didur call “critical posthumanism,”6 who sees the other in the self, Akin modulates and modifies his sense of agency and choice as he contends with complex political and ethical issues. Deployed as an Oankali informer among humans, Akin ultimately emerges as the savior, a spokesperson for the human species who adroitly balances contradictory roles in a culture seemingly “colonial” in its intent

Power, Politics, and Domestic Desire in Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood

Octavia Butler’s works, from her short stories and novellas to her science fiction novels, focus on themes of power, control, bondage, and a desired freedom from servitude. Power structures inevitably center on the master/slave or the captor/captive trope. Her handling of this issue takes on complex manifestations in her works, where enslavement and genetic evolution often form the core of the narrative. Within this framework, hostile and repressive regimes enforce a controlled society. Butler brings race, gender, and sexuality to the foreground of speculative fiction as she deals with complex social and political issues in all their ambiguity. Her handling of these issues defiantly explores taboo topics of incest, bisexuality, genetic mutations, and complicated male and female relational dynamics in the throes of oppressive power politics. In the trilogy Lilith’s Brood, Butler deconstructs the simple binary of oppressor/oppressed through an interaction between the two, apparently on mutually beneficial terms, that may lead to the survival of both.1 The story becomes far more complicated as it embraces insidious forms of force, compulsion, subtle mental conditioning, and human choice, where compulsion, attraction, and repulsion between the oppressor and the oppressed take on fascinatingly interlinked forms of desire

The Black Frontier

As a nationalistic concept, frontier refers to America\u27s westward expansion, which was propelled in the nineteenth century by Manifest Destiny. Culturally, frontier promises even more: the creation of communities, the development of markets and states, the merging of peoples and cultures, and the promise of survival and persistence based on values of equality and democracy. Thousands of people left their homes in the East to pursue these ideals, including large communities of African Americans. However, African Americans, like many other cultural groups who moved westward, encountered struggles when they reached the new frontier. In some cases, they faced the same problems they left the East to escape. As new frontier territories and states were founded, new regional policies on slavery were also created. When the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) ceded the territories of California and New Mexico to the United States, it outlawed slavery in the new territories. California entered the Union in 1850 as an officially free state. Before the Civil War, about one thousand slaves lived in California, which despite its status as a free state remained inconsistent in defining its anti-slavery laws. The state continued to label as property both fugitive slaves and those who entered the state with their masters before 1850. As a result, de facto slavery continued in California. The state had the largest number of bondservants west of Texas, working in fields and households

Gender Dimensions of User Fees:Implications For Women's Utilization of Health Care

This paper looks at the implications of user fees for women’s utilization of health care services, based on selected studies in Africa. Lack of access to resources and inequitable decision-making power mean that when poor women face out-of-pocket costs such as user fees when seeking health care, the cost of care may become out of reach. Even though many poor women may be exempt from fees, there is little incentive for providers to apply exemptions, as they too are constrained by restrictive economic and health service conditions. If user fees and other out-of-pocket costs are to be retained in resource-poor settings, there is a need to demonstrate how they can be successfully and equitably implemented. The lack of hard evidence on the impact of user fees on women’s health outcomes and reproductive health service utilization reminds us of the urgent need to examine how women cope with health care costs and what trade-offs they make in order to pay for health care. Such studies need to collect gender-disaggregated data in relation to women’s health service utilization and in relation to the range of reproductive health services, taking into account not only out-of-pocket fees charged by public health providers but also by private and traditional providers

Local cohomology and stratification

We outline an algorithm to recover the canonical (or, coarsest) stratification of a given finite-dimensional regular CW complex into cohomology manifolds, each of which is a union of cells. The construction proceeds by iteratively localizing the poset of cells about a family of subposets; these subposets are in turn determined by a collection of cosheaves which capture variations in cohomology of cellular neighborhoods across the underlying complex. The result is a nested sequence of categories, each containing all the cells as its set of objects, with the property that two cells are isomorphic in the last category if and only if they lie in the same canonical stratum. The entire process is amenable to efficient distributed computation.Comment: Final version, published in Foundations of Computational Mathematic

Bases for Refusing International Extradition Requests - Capital Punishment and Torture

This Essay is an attempt to contribute to the scholarly investigation into how to reconcile the complementary and competing goals of protecting national security in the interest of law enforcement while still guaranteeing the protection of basic human rights of defendants. It focuses on two issues - capital punishment and torture - which form the bases for state refusal to extradite fugitives

Cost of External Finance and Selection into Entrepreneurship

This paper examines the extent to which the positive relationship between personal wealth and entry into entrepreneurship is due to financing constraints. I exploit a tax reform and use unique micro-data from Denmark to study how exogenous changes in the cost of external finance shape both the probability of entering entrepreneurship and the characteristics of those who become entrepreneurs. As expected, differences-in-differences estimates show that the entry rates for individuals who faced an increase in the cost of finance fell by 40% relative to those whose cost of external finance was unchanged. However, while some of the fall in entry was due to less wealthy individuals with high human capital (confirming the presence of financing constraints), the greatest relative decline in entry came from individuals with lower human capital, many of whom were above median wealth. This finding suggests that an important part of the positive relationship between personal wealth and entrepreneurship may be driven by the fact that wealthy individuals with lower ability can start new businesses because they are less likely to face the disciplining effect of external finance.financing constraints, entrepreneurship, entry.

Entrepreneurship and the Discipline of External Finance

I confirm the finding that the propensity to start a new firm rises sharply among those in the top five percentiles of personal wealth. This pattern is more pronounced for entrants in less capital intensive sectors. Prior to entry, founders in this group earn about 6% less compared to those who stay in paid employment. Their firms are more likely to fail early and conditional on survival, less likely to be make money. This pattern is only true for the most-wealthy individuals, and is attenuated for wealthy individuals starting firms in capital intensive industries. Taken together, these findings suggest that the spike in entry at the top end of the wealth distribution is driven by low-ability individuals who can afford to start (and sometimes continue running) weaker firms because they do not face the discipline of external finance.