Algunas reflexiones sobre la diáspora

Ponencia presentada en el Coloquio Internacional “Políticas de la frontera. Cartografías geopolíticas y culturales”. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, UNAM, octubre 2008.Esta ponencia discute brevemente el concepto de la diáspora. En un primer momento se establecen algunas coordenadas teóricas que nos permiten diferenciar a una diáspora y el proceso de diasporización de otros fenómenos como la inmigración. En un segundo momento, se propone que la literatura, además de ser un medio de representación que contribuye a la formación de una diáspora, también articula la experiencia diaspórica. Esto se ejemplifica con la novela Brick Lane de Monica Ali

Salem, 1692

Ponencia presentada en el Coloquio interdisciplinario sobre brujas. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, UNAM, octubre 2004.La cacería de brujas que tuvo lugar en la población de Salem en 1692 marcó el imaginario estadounidense tan profundamente que se ha convertido en la metáfora por excelencia de la paranoia y la persecución, sobre todo desde la publicación de The Crucible de Arthur Miller, en 1953. En comparación con las persecuciones europeas, en Salem murieron pocas brujas (hubo 19 ejecuciones y 150 encarcelamientos), pero los acontecimientos de Salem son memorables porque ocurrieron cuando las persecuciones masivas en Europa estaban terminando. Esta ponencia ofrece un recuento de los acontecimientos ocurridos en Salem y una posible explicación de ellos

British women writers and the public sphere between the Wars: Winifred Holtby, Storm Jameson, Naomi Mitchison, and Rebecca West.

PhDThis thesis examines how Winifred Holtby, Storm Jameson, Naomi Mitchison and Rebecca West appropriated the political ideas of the interwar period into their fiction and sought to transform abstract ideals into values with which to judge and improve social life. For all four writers, this pursuit takes the form of showing the complex relations between theory and practice as experienced by particular individuals. My premise here is the idea that political ideals are based upon the moral principles used by persons to guide their conduct in the pursuit of individual and collective happiness. Chapter One discusses the socialist concepts of loyalty, equality and fraternity as the values upon which the good society should be constructed and the self-appointed role of writers as public intellectuals whose task was to counteract political apathy and encourage the practice of active citizenship. Chapter Two examines Holtby's Eutychus or the Future of the Pulpit, Jameson's No Time Like the Present and Rebecca West's "The Strange Necessity" to demonstrate how literature was intended as a tool in the defence against the atomisation effected by the impact of modern life on culture, and a bulwark against the concomitant subjectivism which resulted from the extensive retreat into private life. Chapters Three and Four examine the practice of politics itself, with particular emphasis on the social bonds proposed to replace the instrumentality of interpersonal relationships in capitalist societies. The texts examined are Mitchison's We Have Been Warned, Holtby's South Riding, Jameson's In the Second Year and Mirror in Darkness, as well as West's Harriet Hume. Chapter Five focuses on Jameson's That Was Yesterday and West's The Thinking Reed and discusses the difficulties faced by women unable to negotiate the boundaries between the domestic and the public sphere of sociability as a result of the irreconciliability of self-determination and social demands

Portico

A partir del inicio del siglo XIX, los viajes de los estadunidenses, por una parte, y de mexicanos, por otra, por el septentrión mexicano se multiplicaron. Con propósitos distintos, los actores de estos periplos escribieron informes, diarios, crónicas de viajes, etc. que nos permiten conocer cómo percibían este inmenso espacio que en gran medida era una terra incognita El propósito de este artículo consiste en dar cuenta del bagaje cultural que unos y otros portaban desde sus respectivos lugares de origen para después comparar los documentos que unos y otros redactaron acerca del mismo territorio pero con "miradas" diferentes

La educación superior en Estados Unidos: claves para una lectura

Presentación; Introducción: cambios y continuidades; Los colleges coloniales: 1636-1789; La nación emergente: 1789-1869; La reconstrucción y la industrialización: 1870-1900; El siglo XX: el movimiento por la educación general y el Plan Chicago; La época de oro: 1950-197

Respiratory responses to hypercapnia and hypoxia in mice with genetic ablation of Kir5.1 (Kcnj16)

Inward rectifier (Kir) potassium channels contribute to the control of electrical activity in excitable tissues and their activity is modulated by many biochemical factors, including protons. Heteromeric Kir4.1–Kir5.1 channels are highly pH sensitive within the physiological range of pH changes and are strongly expressed by the peripheral chemosensors as well as in the brainstem pH-sensitive areas which mediate respiratory responses to changes in blood and brain levels of /[H+]. In the present study, Kir5.1 knockout mice (Kir5.1−/−) were used to determine the role of these channels in the chemosensory control of breathing. We found that Kir5.1−/− mice presented with persistent metabolic acidosis and a clear respiratory phenotype. Despite metabolic acidosis, ventilation at rest and in hyperoxic hypercapnia were similar in wild-type and Kir5.1−/− mice. Ventilatory responses to hypoxia and normoxic hypercapnia were significantly reduced in Kir5.1−/− mice; however, carotid body chemoafferent responses to hypoxia and CO2 were not affected. In the in situ brainstem–spinal cord preparations with denervated peripheral chemoreceptors, resting phrenic nerve activity and phrenic nerve responses to respiratory acidosis or isohydric hypercapnia were also similar in Kir5.1−/− and wild-type mice. In in situ preparations of Kir5.1−/− mice with intact peripheral chemoreceptors, application of CN− resulted in a significantly reduced phrenic nerve response, suggesting that the relay of peripheral chemosensory information to the CNS is compromised. We suggest that this compensatory modulation of the peripheral chemosensory inputs develops in Kir5.1−/− mice in order to counteract the effect of continuing metabolic acidosis on the activity of the peripheral chemoreceptors. These results therefore suggest that despite their intrinsic pH sensitivity, Kir4.1–Kir5.1 channels are dispensable for functional central and peripheral respiratory chemosensitivity