“In the Beginning was Body Language” Clowning and Krump as Spiritual Healing and Resistance

In the neighborhood of HollyWatts in Los Angeles, dance allows a shift from existing as bodies presented as sites of threat and extinction to sources of spiritual empowerment. Clowning and Krump dancers—their subjectivity and their dancing bodies—negotiate survival from trauma and socioeconomic marginalization. I argue that the dancers’ performances act as embodied narratives of “re-membering in the flesh.” The performance acts as a spiritual retrieval and re-integration of traumatic memories and afflictions into memory through the body. Choreography and quotes from dancers support the claim that Krump and Clowning is “re-membering in the flesh” that enacts self-worth, self-defined sexuality, and agency for and by marginalized children and young adults. Close readings of street and staged choreography and quotes establish clear connections to Africana dance history and techniques and spiritual healing. The article includes references to the representations of the dancers’ bodies and their political voices in documentary film

AfroReggae and Grupo Cultural Afro Reggae: A Study of the Early Years

The following study of AfroReggae and Grupo Cultural Afro Reggae (GCAR) calls attention to Brazilian presence and community organizing in the field of Hip Hop studies with a long memory framework: placing AfroReggae and GCAR in a long history of Africana resistance through music in Latin America. !990s GCAR group arises when reggae and Hip Hop music had become new global forms of solidarity among urban marginalized youths worldwide, making use of old and new strategies of social healing (Fernandes 2011). A close look at lyrics from the Hip Hop fusion band and the associated nonprofit organization shape the concepts of performance movement and re-membering in the flesh, to support further studies on resilience through performance in the African diaspora. Like most Hip Hop and reggae music, the band and the organization choreograph what I call a performance movement of resistance against politics of genocide, and a movement that is both therapeutic and rooted in a tradition of resistance

Jenyffer Nascimento’s Epic Poetry of Black Female Empowerment Jenyffer Nascimento: a Poesia Épica de Empoderamento da Mulher Negra

This article presents results of auto-ethnography, literary analysis, and fieldwork research to answer an underlying, perhaps unresolved, concern, relevant to this dossier: how can we produce an ethical dialogue as transnational Black Feminists, among Black Brazilian women, and North American Black women, in an ethical manner, while realizing that one may (not ever) be a part of the “carnival without you in it.” Fertile Earth/ Terra Fertil tells a long overdue epic story to an audience within the poetry: Black women, family members, other times a Black man, Brazil, white women, or “you,” undefined. Joy to pain to chaos, sensuality, and ritual, stages of grief to empowerment in a poetic ritual of carnivalesque journey from the heart of the Northeast of Brazil in Pernambuco to the underbelly of Sao Paulo. In We are Rooted Here and They Can’t Pulls Us Up, Bristow et al. demonstrate the multi-generational presence and intellectual production of Black women in Canada. Nascimento’s epic poetry undoes 500 years of policies that have attempted to silence Black women as invisible, unemployed, objectified, infertile (Cidinha DA SILVA, 2014, 113). Black women’s voices echo out of a literary canyon that extends all the way to Canada, a neoliberal rift that keeps Black women out. Each poem analyzed in this article directs conveys challenges relating to Black affect and desire, heteronormativity in the Black Brazilian Movement, and Black women in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and in the Americas

Emerging Internal Symmetries from Effective Spacetimes

Can global internal and spacetime symmetries be connected without supersymmetry? To answer this question, we investigate Minkowski spacetimes with d space-like extra dimensions and point out under which general conditions external symmetries induce internal symmetries in the effective 4-dimensional theories. We further discuss in this context how internal degrees of freedom and spacetime symmetries can mix without supersymmetry in agreement with the Coleman-Mandula theorem. We present some specific examples which rely on a direct product structure of spacetime such that orthogonal extra dimensions can have symmetries which mix with global internal symmetries. This mechanism opens up new opportunities to understand global symmetries in particle physics

Gravitational Waves as a New Probe of Bose-Einstein Condensate Dark Matter

There exists a class of ultralight Dark Matter (DM) models which could form a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) in the early universe and behave as a single coherent wave instead of individual particles in galaxies. We show that a generic BEC DM halo intervening along the line of sight of a gravitational wave (GW) signal could induce an observable change in the speed of GW, with the effective refractive index depending only on the mass and self-interaction of the constituent DM particles and the GW frequency. Hence, we propose to use the deviation in the speed of GW as a new probe of the BEC DM parameter space. With a multi-messenger approach to GW astronomy and/or with extended sensitivity to lower GW frequencies, the entire BEC DM parameter space can be effectively probed by our new method in the near future

RE-MEMBERING TRAUMA IN THE FLESH: LITERARY AND PERFORMATIVE REPRESENTATIONS OF RACE AND GENDER IN THE AMERICAS

This dissertation explores transgenerational traumas of slavery, discrimination, social marginalization pertaining to women and youth of color. The analyses approach novels, testimonio, poetry and performances (1985-2005) with feminist, postcolonial, trauma studies, performance, and psychoanalytic criticism. The manuscript follows three avenues. First, I present a comparative analysis of three novels working through the “postmemory” of slavery. Then I analyze various literary genres that cope with wounded bodies and fragmented identities. This second avenue splits into three streets, exploring repressed sexuality, and naming and internal colonization). Finally, I explore urban youths’ performance. This last avenue stops at various intersections to look at different dances and songs that heal urban youths and help them to affirm their own voices. With a postcolonial approach to trauma studies, Chapter two connects re-membering with storytelling and ghost embodiment. I observe how “neo-abolitionist” novels heal past traumas in Beloved by Toni Morrison, Ponciá Vicencio by Conceição Evaristo, and I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem by Maryse Condé. Chapter three discusses how texts work through violated maternity, fragmented identity and repressed sexuality. I compare scenes from the novels with the testimonios Reyita: The Life of a Cuban Woman in the Twentieth Century (María de los Reyes Castillo) and Borderlands/La Frontera (Gloria Anzaldúa), and with poems fromselected Quilombhoje Collective’s “Cadernos Negros” volumes. This concludes the first section on re- membering trauma in writing. Chapters 4 and 5 discuss re-membering trauma through performance. Turning to documentaries on dance and music, I analyze performance that promotes self-esteem and agency for/by marginalized youths from Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro. The last two chapters include José Junior’s Da Favela para o mundo: A historia do grupo cultural AfroReggae, documentaries RIZE (David LaChapelle) and Favela Rising (Matt Mochary and Jeff Zymbalist), and music album Nenhum Motivo Explica a Guerra (AfroReggae). Any artwork presents the potential to heal trauma and its painful portrayal may be difficult to confront. The texts here present struggles against discrimination and selective amnesia bound to questions of race, socio-economic marginalization, and gender. They suggest resolutions through narrative re-membering—retrieval and re-integration of traumatic memories and afflictions into memory

Resisting Gentrification: The Theoretical and Practice Contributions of Social Work

Summary Gentrification is changing the landscape of many cities worldwide, exacerbating economic and racial inequality. Despite its relevance to social work, the field has been conspicuously absent from scholarship related to gentrification. This paper introduces the dominant view of gentrification (a political economic lens), highlighting its contributions and vulnerabilities, then introduces four case studies that illuminate the distinct contributions of social work to broaden the ways in which gentrification is theorized and responded to within communities. Findings When gentrification is analyzed exclusively through a political economy lens, researchers, policy makers, and practitioners are likely to focus on changes in land and home values, reducing the adverse effects of gentrification to a loss of affordable housing. A singular focus on affordable housing risks paying insufficient attention to racial struggle, perpetuating damage-based views of poor people and neighborhoods, and obfuscating political, social, and cultural displacements. Social work practice—including social action group work, community organizing, community development, and participatory research and planning—offers a holistic approach to understanding, resisting, and responding to gentrification and advance equitable development in the city. Applications By exploring social work practice that amplifies residents’ and change makers’ efforts, advances existing community organizing, produces new insights, builds inter-neighborhood and interdisciplinary collaborations, and facilitates social action and policy change, this paper helps community practitioners to reimagine the role of social work research and practice in gentrifying neighborhoods

Room temperature organic exciton-polariton condensate in a lattice

Funding: The Würzburg group acknowledges financial support from the state of Bavaria. We also thank the Würzburg–Dresden Cluster of Excellence ct.qmat for financial support.Interacting Bosons in artificial lattices have emerged as a modern platform to explore collective manybody phenomena and exotic phases of matter as well as to enable advanced on-chip simulators. On chip, exciton–polaritons emerged as a promising system to implement and study bosonic non-linear systems in lattices, demanding cryogenic temperatures. We discuss an experiment conducted on a polaritonic lattice at ambient conditions: We utilize fluorescent proteins providing ultra-stable Frenkel excitons. Their soft nature allows for mechanically shaping them in the photonic lattice. We demonstrate controlled loading of the coherent condensate in distinct orbital lattice modes of different symmetries. Finally, we explore the self-localization of the condensate in a gap-state, driven by the interplay of effective interaction and negative effective mass in our lattice. We believe that this work establishes organic polaritons as a serious contender to the well-established GaAs platform for a wide range of applications relying on coherent Bosons in lattices.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe