265 research outputs found

    Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race

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    Proceeding from Robyn Wiegman's call for a transition from questions of "why" to "how" with regard to formations of race, this article proposes a heuristic, the "scriptive thing," to analyze ways in which racial subjectivation emerges through everyday physical engagement with the material world. The term scriptive thing integrates performance studies and "thing theory" by highlighting the ways in which things prompt, structure, or choreograph behavior. A knife, a camera, and a novel all invite—indeed, create occasions for—repetitions of acts, distinctive and meaningful motions of eyes, hands, shoulders, hips, feet. These things are citational in that they arrange and propel bodies in recognizable ways, through paths of evocative movement that have been traveled before. I use the term script as a theatrical professional might, to denote not a rigid dictation of performed action but, rather, a necessary openness to resistance, interpretation, and improvisation. A "scriptive thing," like a play script, broadly structures a performance while unleashing original, live variations. Like the police in Louis Althusser's famous scenario, scriptive things leap out within a field, address an individual, and demand to be reckoned with. By answering a hail, by entering the scripted scenario, the individual is interpellated into ideology and thus into subjecthood. I conduct close readings of scriptive things, including a photograph of a light-skinned woman posing in about 1930 with a caricature of a young African American man, a set of twentieth-century arcade photographs, a viciously racist 1898 alphabet book by E. W. Kemble, and a black doll called "Uncle Tom" that was whipped in the 1850s by a white girl who would grow up to write best-selling children's books. These readings show how interpellation occurs through confrontations in the material world, through dances between people and things.Other Research UnitAfrican and African American Studie

    Toys Are Good for Us: Why We Should Embrace the Historical Integration of Children’s Literature, Material Culture, and Play

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    This manifesto argues that the field of children’s literature has, for too long, downplayed the historical relationship among children’s literature, toys, and play. If we desist from erecting arbitrary boundaries among these modes of cultural production, we stand to gain three benefits: we will better understand how children’s literature actually functions in the everyday lives of children; we will mitigate the “top, down” understanding of children’s literature that underestimates children’s agency; and we will hinge our field to disciplines and interdisciplines that already care about material culture and play—and thus we will expand our influence and power across the university.African and African American Studie

    Mount Pinatubo, Inflammatory Cytokines, and the Immunological Ecology of Aeta Hunter-Gatherers

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    Early growth cessation and reproduction are predicted to maximize fitness under conditions of high adult mortality, factors that could explain the pygmy phenotype of many rainforest hunter-gatherers. This life-history hypothesis is elegant but contentious in part because it lacks a clear biological mechanism. One mechanism stems from the field of human immunological ecology and the concept of inflammation memory across the life cycle and into subsequent generations. Maternal exposures to disease can infl uence immunological cues present in breast milk; because maternal provisioning via lactation occurs during critical periods of development, it is plausible that these cues can also mediate early growth cessation and small body size. Such epigenetic hypotheses are difficult to test, but the concept of developmental programming is attractive because it could explain how the stature of a population can change over time, in terms of both secular increases and rapid intergenerational decreases. Here we explore this concept by focusing on the Aeta, a population of former hunter-gatherers, and the Ilocano, a population of rice farmers. We predicted that Aeta mothers would produce breast milk with higher concentrations of four bioactive factors due to high infectious burdens. Further, we predicted that the concentrations of these factors would be highest in the cohort of women born in the early 1990s, when exposure to infectious disease was acute following the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in June 1991. We analyzed levels of adiponectin, C-reactive protein, and epidermal growth factor in the milk of 24 Aeta and 31 Ilocano women and found no detectable differences, whereas levels of transforming growth factor-β2 were elevated among the Aeta, particularly as a function of maternal age. We found no difference between cohorts divided by the volcanic eruption (n = 43 born before, n = 12 born after). We discuss the implications of our findings for the terminal investment hypothesis and we suggest that the historical ecology of the Aeta is a promising model system for testing epigenetic hypotheses focused on the evolution of small body size
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