Tearing the Goat\u27s Flesh: Homosexuality, Abjection, and the Production of a Late Twentieth-Century Black Masculinity

A negative image of the homosexual must be promoted to preserve the heterosexual society, an idea that extends to the construction of African-American masculinity. African Americans represent the lack of boundaries in a chaotic culture. The resulting presumption that blacks are subhuman and irrational comes from the history of slavery and the presumed separateness of the race. Homosexuals also have been cut from their history by society and therefore must rediscover their roots to reject society\u27s negative images

Disseminating Heterotopia

Focuses on the motion picture The Passion of Remembrance by Isaac Julien and Maureen Blackwood, and the book Tales of Neveryon by Samuel Delany. Highlights of the motion picture and the book; Author\u27s argument that the tendency to ossify myths only leads to further confusion; Understanding of the mythic process

Primitive at the Plantation\u27s Edge

There comes a time when the only thing that one can do is admit defeat. Standing at the tail end of a Black Studies movement established as part of the articulation of anti-segregationist, anti-colonialist African and African American political and cultural insurgencies, one is made painfully aware of a sort of necessary and inevitable social and professional marginalization structuring the everyday existence of the so-called black scholar. The broadly imagined ethical outlines of even the most valued projects of black intellectualism continue as ornamental, overly moralistic, never quite fully valid aspects of the industry / government / education complex that we decorously name the American University. Accommodated in ever more brightly colored, if distantly placed and institutionally vulnerable, houses, the Black, African, Africana scholastic project has only the most limited means by which it might affect a sort of inchoate articulation. When times are good and the funding secure the history, thought, and culture of the peoples of the African Diaspora might be taken as a sort of reiteration of the central conceits of American and European cultural and intellectual orthodoxy. A single red/brown/yellow/blue face appearing intermittently in recruitment brochures or faculty lounges boastfully reminds us of the meritocratic liberalism that presumably underwrites the basic structures of our most cherished educational and intellectual institutions. More impressive still, the scholar of Black Studies might make great use of an apparently never too tired for service plus one account of black subjectivity in which the most traditional ideas of universalism, cosmopolitanism, and western modernity are presumably broadened and deepened through the indication that some representative black individual was there. And when times are lean and narratives of scarcity rub harshly against notions of open-minded largesse one might enact again and yet again a sort of hysterically ineffectual theatrical rebellion, identifying the many always easy to uncover moments of racialist hostility and insensitivity that are among the most profoundly resilient aspects of American and European society

Tarrying with the Private Parts

Two-thirds of the way through Object Lessons (2012), Robyn Wiegman\u27s provocative study of the institutional and ideological development of what she names identity-based modes of inquiry in US colleges and universities, the author recounts a 2003 trip she took to Leiden to attend the inaugural meeting of the International American Studies Association. There, she was regularly met with the claim that American studies, at least as it is practiced by citizens and long-term residents of the United States, was deeply provincial and too caught up with rehearsals of the humdrum difficulties of American social and cultural life, particularly our always fraught conversations about race, gender, class, and sexuality. American studies in both its old and new substantiations was imagined as not sufficiently in the world, far too eager to reiterate the basic assumptions underlying so-called American exceptionalism, even as basic geo-political realities clearly demonstrated that the United States, if not exactly America itself, was rightly understood as but one nation among many

UC-30 Malware Analysis Using Reverse Engineering

Cybercrimes are a billion-dollar industry that is rapidly growing by the day. One of the biggest threats faced by companies is the infection of malware. New forms of malware are created daily and ever evolving to evade detection methods. Understanding how malware infects your system and how it eludes detection is crucial to keeping a company\u27s network and devices safe. During this project we will be using reverse engineering methods to better understand the functionality of malware, as well as how it eludes detection. We will be using IDAPro and WiDbg to perform the reverse engineering. Using this knowledge, we will create a set of security standards to help companies to protect themselves from these infections. We will also create a document on how to secure a virtual machine for malware analysis. This will help future students who also are interested in analyzing malware themselves. Our preliminary results include understanding some of the most used forms of malware evasion techniques. These techniques include stalling delays, which is when a piece of malware remains idle to defeat time-based antivirus scans. Another technique is action required delays, which is when a piece of malware will only execute once an action or group of actions are performed this will trigger the malware to execute. Another way that malware is able to evade detection is fragmentation. In this technique the malware will split into multiple different fragments, which alone do not raise flags as suspicious, then rejoin and execute.Advisors(s): Dr. Hossain ShahriarTopic(s): SecurityIT 498

Photochemistry of Furyl- and Thienyldiazomethanes: Spectroscopic Characterization of Triplet 3-Thienylcarbene

Photolysis (λ \u3e 543 nm) of 3-thienyldiazomethane (1), matrix isolated in Ar or N2 at 10 K, yields triplet 3-thienylcarbene (13) and α-thial-methylenecyclopropene (9). Carbene 13 was characterized by IR, UV/vis, and EPR spectroscopy. The conformational isomers of 3-thienylcarbene (s-E and s-Z) exhibit an unusually large difference in zero-field splitting parameters in the triplet EPR spectrum (|D/hc| = 0.508 cm–1, |E/hc| = 0.0554 cm–1; |D/hc| = 0.579 cm–1, |E/hc| = 0.0315 cm–1). Natural Bond Orbital (NBO) calculations reveal substantially differing spin densities in the 3-thienyl ring at the positions adjacent to the carbene center, which is one factor contributing to the large difference in D values. NBO calculations also reveal a stabilizing interaction between the sp orbital of the carbene carbon in the s-Z rotamer of 13 and the antibonding σ orbital between sulfur and the neighboring carbon—an interaction that is not observed in the s-E rotamer of 13. In contrast to the EPR spectra, the electronic absorption spectra of the rotamers of triplet 3-thienylcarbene (13) are indistinguishable under our experimental conditions. The carbene exhibits a weak electronic absorption in the visible spectrum (λmax = 467 nm) that is characteristic of triplet arylcarbenes. Although studies of 2-thienyldiazomethane (2), 3-furyldiazomethane (3), or 2-furyldiazomethane (4) provided further insight into the photochemical interconversions among C5H4S or C5H4O isomers, these studies did not lead to the spectroscopic detection of the corresponding triplet carbenes (2-thienylcarbene (11), 3-furylcarbene (23), or 2-furylcarbene (22), respectively)

Vernacular Soliloquy, Theatrical Gesture, and Embodied Consciousness in The Marrow of Tradition

Charles Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition (1901) is overwhelmingly understood as an historical novel. Critics have again and again focused on its journalistic historicity; its ambivalent racial politics; its attitudes towards assimilation, separatism, vengeance, and resistance; and Chesnutt’s alleged biographical identification with various characters. This generalized preoccupation with the explicitly political or historical contours of the novel frequently precludes closer scrutiny of Chesnutt’s formal literary strategies. This paper shirks that tendency by considering The Marrow of Tradition not just as an historical novel, but also as a novel of consciousness. Viewing the novel from the perspective of its representation of consciousness both reframes its historiographical bearing and opens up new ways to understand Chesnutt’s fiction and nineteenth-century African American literature. It argues that the location of black consciousness in the novel is the soliloquy, and demonstrates that the soliloquy should be understood as a form of “embodied consciousness”: a narrative mode endowed with the expressivity of theatrical gesture. It further examines these performative gestures in relation to additional patterns in the novel: first, the destructive circulation of written, material texts; and second, recurring images of corporeality and physical breakdown wherein one’s capacity for speech is endangered. As they are invulnerable to such formal compromise and breakdown, Chesnutt’s soliloquies together produce a counter-archive of vernacular memory and reveal how dramatic form functions in the novel more broadly

Rendering Complex Scenes with Memory-Coherent Ray Tracing

Simulating realistic lighting and rendering complex scenes are usually considered separate problems with incompatible solutions. Accurate lighting calculations are typically performed using ray tracing algorithms, which require that the entire scene database reside in memory to perform well. Conversely, most systems capable of rendering complex scenes use scan-conversion algorithms that access memory coherently, but are unable to incorporate sophisticated illumination. We have developed algorithms that use caching and lazy creation of texture and geometry to manage scene complexity. To improve cache performance, we increase locality of reference by dynamically reordering the rendering computation based on the contents of the cache. We have used these algorithms to compute images of scenes containing millions of primitives, while storing ten percent of the scene description in memory. Thus, a machine of a given memory capacity can render realistic scenes that are an order of magnitude more complex than was previously possible

Kara Walker : Pictures from Another Time

" The University of Michigan Museum of Art has commissioned African-American artist Kara Walker to create a site-specific installation in its Apse - a panoramic frieze in her signature medium, cut-paper silhouettes on a life-size scale. " -- Publisher's website