Strange Correspondences: Late Capitalism and Late Style in the Work of Wilson Harris and John Berger

This article compares the late work of Guyanese author Wilson Harris with that of the English writer and critic John Berger. Taking Theodor Adorno’s reflections on late style as its point of departure, it situates the unconventional aesthetics of both writers in relation to the changes in society and experience unleashed by late capitalism. Focusing on Harris’s The Ghost of Memory (2006) and Berger’s From A to X (2008), the essay argues that the formal logic of these novels registers the pressures generated in the era of late capitalism by the unfolding dynamics of the neoliberal regime of accumulation and the fallout from the increasing financialization of the world-economy since the 1970s. Both texts work to protest the radical simplification of human and extra-human nature central to finance capital’s drive to transform all of reality into generic income streams. Sharing an emphasis on the need to revitalize the sensorium and to overcome the Cartesian separation of mind and body, society and nature, Harris and Berger maintain the possibility of an alternative mapping of global community

“It’s the mass that counts” : striking energies in working-class fiction

This article considers the way in which the political ecologies of coal and oil overdetermine the representation of labour struggles in Ellen Wilkinson’s Clash (1929) and Ralph de Boissière’s Crown Jewel (1952). The historical strikes around which these novels are organized were sparked by conflict over working conditions in, respectively, the coal industry in the UK and the oil industry in Trinidad. Analysing the relationship between the energies generated by mass strike action and the narrative energetics of fiction, the article explores how Wilkinson and de Boissière reshape the novel form in their efforts to represent working-class life

“Time’s carcase” : waste, labour, and finance capital in the Atlantic world-ecology

This article deploys the category of ‘waste’ as an analytical optic through which to explore the connections between the degradation of labour, the contradictions of the value-form, the environment-making dynamics of commodity frontiers, and the whirl of finance capital. This investigation forms the basis of a comparison between two very different literary texts: Thomas Hardy’s short-story “On the Western Circuit” (1891), set in England’s semi-peripheral West Country; and José Américo de Almeida’s novel Trash (A Bagaceira, 1928), set across northeast Brazil’s sugar zone and peripheral sertão region

Demon landscapes, uneven ecologies : folk-spirits in Guyanese fiction

I emphasize the affinity between the Nondescript and the massacouraman since my intention in this article is to move from a consideration of Waterton’s joke as an unconscious expression of the anxieties provoked in colonial explorers by confrontation with the Amerindian spirit landscape of the Guyanese interior – anxieties that often revolved around the potential breakdown of received colonialist understandings of the relationship between human and extra - human natures – to an analysis of the very different significance of the massacouraman for postcolonial authors. In what follows, I first consider the way the Nondescript’s massacouraman - like scrambling of species boundaries and its allusive manifestation of anxieties over the organization of nature might be viewed in relation to processes of uneven and combined development. Drawing on Stephen Shapiro’s claim that Gothic modes and devices tend to flourish during periods of transition in the capitalist world - system, I connect the element of Got hic grotesquerie that surrounds Waterton’s creation to the reorganization of the global economy in the early nineteenth century and its implications for the peoples and landscapes of Guyana. I next examine a selection of Guyanese novels in which depictions of the massacouraman help mediate the felt experience of later periods of ecological change. Focusing on Wilson Harris’s The Secret Ladder (1964), Roy Heath’s From the Heat of the Day (1979), and Cyril Dabydeen’s Dark Swirl (1988), I show how such depictions respond to the upheavals involved in the reconfiguration of Guyana’s economy over the course of the twentieth century, from the decline and subsequent reorganization of its sugar industry in the period 1920 - 1960 to the impact of neoliberal restructuring in the 1980s. My analysis will be framed by the world - ecology perspective, which posits reality as a historically - and geographically - fluid (yet cyclically stabilized) set of actively reproducing relations between manifold species and environments. In this perspective, historical systems are understood as coproduced by humans alongside the rest of nature, such that capitalism, for example, is to be viewed as a world - ecology – as a historically specific, systemically patterned bundle of human and extra - human relations

Relocating the body : memory, ritual, and form in Caribbean liteature

This thesis approaches the issue of form in the Caribbean novel from the perspective of the key role played by the body as an alternative repository of memory in the region. Whether in terms of the production of the wage-labourer under capitalism or the regulation and exploitation of the slave, the body was the locus of a series of power relations upon which colonialist / capitalist expansion hinged. Yet for the colonised, its connection to cultural practices such as vodun ritual meant that it served too as the amanuensis of an historical legacy denied 'legitimate' expression. Tracing the impact of the various material and ideological constraints imposed upon not only the body but also land and language from the time of slavery, the thesis explores how three writers in particular - Patrick Chamoiseau, Wilson Harris, and Earl Lovelace - have sought to integrate this embodied tradition in order to transform a body politic scarred by racial polarisation, underdevelopment, and victimhood. The thesis examines how the need for an original epic form able to express the complexity of the Caribbean's history requires are-visionary approach to memory. It suggests that the latter in tum requires the formulation of an original philosophy, one that, reflecting the admixture of cultures in the Caribbean, makes use of a diversity of intellectual traditions, including traditional African religion, to forge ontological and epistemological modes capable of conveying cross-cultural community. The incorporation of the insights provided by rituals based on ego-displacement, for example, contributes to a form that seeks to undo the consolidation of character and narrative, consuming or reritualising the past to release a new vision of the future. Moreover, the worldview behind this form offers a means to envisage the renewal of the national project and the transformation of the capitalist world system

Stability and instability of hydromagnetic Taylor–Couette flows

Decades ago S. Lundquist, S. Chandrasekhar, P. H. Roberts and R. J. Tayler first posed questions about the stability of Taylor–Couette flows of conducting material under the influence of large-scale magnetic fields. These and many new questions can now be answered numerically where the nonlinear simulations even provide the instability-induced values of several transport coefficients. The cylindrical containers are axially unbounded and penetrated by magnetic background fields with axial and/or azimuthal components. The influence of the magnetic Prandtl number Pm on the onset of the instabilities is shown to be substantial. The potential flow subject to axial fields becomes unstable against axisymmetric perturbations for a certain supercritical value of the averaged Reynolds number Rm¯=√Re⋅Rm (with Re the Reynolds number of rotation, Rm its magnetic Reynolds number). Rotation profiles as flat as the quasi-Keplerian rotation law scale similarly but only for Pm≫1 while for Pm≪1 the instability instead sets in for supercritical Rm at an optimal value of the magnetic field. Among the considered instabilities of azimuthal fields, those of the Chandrasekhar-type, where the background field and the background flow have identical radial profiles, are particularly interesting. They are unstable against nonaxisymmetric perturbations if at least one of the diffusivities is non-zero. For Pm≪1 the onset of the instability scales with Re while it scales with Rm¯ for Pm≫1. Even superrotation can be destabilized by azimuthal and current-free magnetic fields; this recently discovered nonaxisymmetric instability is of a double-diffusive character, thus excluding Pm=1. It scales with Re for Pm→0 and with Rm for Pm→∞. The presented results allow the construction of several new experiments with liquid metals as the conducting fluid. Some of them are described here and their results will be discussed together with relevant diversifications of the magnetic instability theory including nonlinear numerical studies of the kinetic and magnetic energies, the azimuthal spectra and the influence of the Hall effect

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead