Tom Zé's Fabrication Defect and the “Esthetics of Plagiarism”: a postmodern/postcolonial “Cannibalist Manifesto”

On his 1998 album Fabrication Defect the Brazilian composer-performer Tom Zé articulates the discourses of postmodernity and postcoloniality. More than simply touching on various aspects of ‘‘post-ness,’’ Zé forges from them an updated manifesto premised on Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 ‘‘Cannibalist Manifesto.’’ The former Tropica´lia musician proposes an ‘‘Esthetics of Plagiarism’’ as a way to appropriate and then reformulate the products of Western techno-capitalism. In this discussion, I will argue that the composer reconfigures the modernist and colonial tropes of primitivism and cannibalism in a subversively technophilic postmodern and postcolonial fashion - an oppositionality embodied in the album’s ‘‘defective android’’ figure

Ecologically and Socially Sustainable Livestock Development in Marginal Areas

“Marginal areas” are perceived as difficult and unproductive landscapes, always under the threat of drought, desertification and poverty. Yet, both dryland and high altitude marginal areas have an extraordinary output of livestock products; in the efficiency of producing human-edible protein they far surpass more fertile areas. This productivity under adverse climatic conditions rests on sophisticated strategies and social institutions developed by pastoral communities to deal with variability in the availability of resources. It depends on the use of animal genetic resources that are adapted to make best use of local vegetation and can cope with seasonal variations in availability. Livestock production in marginal areas is based on the principle of opportunistic and optimal use of available resources; it differs fundamentally from the principles of mainstream animal science in which everything is measurable and predictable. The first requisite for ecologically and socially sustainable livestock development in marginal areas is recognition of this fact. Secondly, interventions should focus on enhancing the opportunistic use of resources whose availability is unpredictable. Building on this principle, further essential policy measures include support for mobility and modern communication, securing the commons, payment for environmental services as well as value addition and dedicated marketing channels for the high quality livestock products generated. The UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) provides the legal framework for such an approach and Biocultural Community Protocols as mandated by the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-Sharing are an important first step towards leveraging such supportive measures

The "Robot Voodoo Power" thesis: Afrofuturism and anti-anti-essentialism from Sun Ra to Kool Keith

In the 1990s the term Afrofuturism emerged to describe a vein of science fiction inspired artistic production that repositions black subjects in a purportedly race free future that is nonetheless coded as white. While ostensibly about the future, Afrofuturism in fact works dialectically with an equally overwritten past to critique the reified distance between racialized fictions of black magic and white science. This study examines this dialectic by focusing on three Afrofuturist musicians: the experimental jazz bandleader Sun Ra, the funk bandleader George Clinton, and the hip hop artist MC Kool Keith. Using the concepts of Ra’s myth-science, Clinton’s P-Funk, and Keith’s robot voodoo power, the article tracks a historical continuity of collapsing fictions of both past and future in Afrofuturist music. Following from Paul Gilroy’s discussion of the unsatisfactory nature of the two critical positions most commonly taken with regard to black identity—the essentialist and anti-essentialist arguments—the article proposes that such Afrofuturist constructions reflect strategic versions of what Gilroy refers to as anti-anti-essentialism. The robot voodoo power thesis thus recognizes in Afrofuturism a dialectical third way out of the double binds and unproductive debates about racial essence and non-essence

“He’s calling his flock now”: black music and postcoloniality from Buddy Bolden’s New Orleans to Sefyu’s Paris

This article constitutes a close reading and sonic analysis of the Senegalese-Parisian rapper, Sefyu’s “En noir et blanc.” It performs an intertextual and musical analysis as a way to bring into form the historical and discursive continuities between double consciousness and postcoloniality that we can hear in the sonic contours and performed histories of “black music.” The article makes the argument that by listening closely to European hip hop we can hear that double consciousness is the particular African American form of the global experience of postcoloniality. By tackling such a large question through the lens of a single piece of music, we can see in detail how, through musical performance, hip hop births a new consciousness both attuned to this continuity and calibrated to undermine the asymmetries that both double consciousness and postcoloniality describe

Energy-Loss Particle Identification in 2-D Silicon Drift Detectors

A relatively new type of transducer known as the Silicon Drift Detector (SDD) has been fabricated onto thin silicon wafers. SDD operates like a miniature, high-resolution, 2-D Time-projection chamber. One of these devices can detect two dimensions of an ionizing particle\u27s position, and its integrated electrical charge output level isproportional to the particle\u27s energy loss through the silicon. An array ofSDD\u27s, arranged in three coaxial cylinders, is being considered as part of an instrument surrounding the beam pipe of highly-relativistic colliding beam facility, where it would be used to simultaneously track individual paths of thousands of charged particles emerging from each primary collision. Energy-loss data from the (x,y) pixels of each track allow individual particle identification as an electron, pion, kaon or proton. CERN\u27s Monte Carlo modeling program, GEANT, is being used to predict energy loss at high statistical accuracy to account for high-energy tailing of the more prevalent pions. GEANT has been installed on a Linux workstation in Little Rock. Speeding up the modeling process is being investigated using parallel virtual memory techniques and groupings of Linux workstations