‘Inauthentic’ \u3ci\u3eSukumbasi:\u3c/i\u3e The Politics of Aesthetics and Urgency in Kathmandu

This article discusses how claims of the urban poor for the right to the city come up against governmental programs seeking to secure norms of private property, environmental sustainability, and elite aesthetics. Here, the city in question is Kathmandu, Nepal, and the urban poor are referred to as sukumbasi, squatters. Baviskar (2011) defines ‘elite politics’ as a mode of expressing anxieties of the self in relation to one’s physical surroundings. I interpret a liberal environmentalist project— the Bagmati Action Plan—in terms of such an elite politics, and explore the ways in which this river restoration program was taken up by the Nepali state. I show how bourgeois liberal environmentalism, when it encounters ‘the slum,’ produces spatial imaginaries, such as ‘pure rivers’ and ‘green riverbanks,’ and representations of sukumbasi as ‘inauthentic’ residents. This logic often furnishes the rationale for violently expelling sukumbasi from the slum and the city. Adopting the state’s governmental frames to distinguish between ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ sukumbasi, the Bagmati Action Plan’s leadership produced class cleavage among the landless—between squatters, who were alleged to be ‘landed’ and those given a ‘landless’ designation. As such, this article asks two questions: How does the threat of violence forge sukumbasi political subjectivity and inform renewed strategies of inhabitance? And, what implications these strategies have for understanding the challenges facing the politics of the poor? These inquiries locate the practices of the poor within the context of a ‘politics of urgency’— an ad hoc creative and counterintuitive ‘non-movement’ forged in the crucible of crisis, in which the organized practice of everyday life is disrupted and stretched in new and uncertain directions

Ally Sloper: The First Comics Superstar?

This book is the result of the conference ‘Comics Scenarios: Cultural Analyses of a Picto-Graphical Medium’, organised by the Universities of Berlin and Viadrina, and held in Berlin in 2003. My chapter involves the early British comics character ‘Ally Sloper’, a Victorian anti-hero, and his crossover with other mediums, such as music hall. Specifically, it is an investigation of the various texts which have borne the signifier ‘Ally Sloper’ in the years between 1867 and 1916, in an attempt to reconstruct their context and hence recover the meanings carried by this cultural icon at key moments in his history. It also asks how Sloper’s cross-fertilisation with other mediums constituted the forerunner for modern multinational capitalism in the entertainment business. The approaches taken include a combination of political economy and Cultural Studies methodologies

The relationships between the HIV test interval, demographic factors and HIV disease progression

Individuals developing an HIV seroconversion illness may experience rapid disease progression. Information on seroconversion illness is rarely collected in most cohort studies; thus the aim of this study was to assess the value of the HIV test interval (the time between last negative and first positive HIV tests) as a proxy for seroconversion illness. Among 8229 seroconverters, test intervals ranged from 0-5282 days, and varied by gender, risk group, age and calendar year of seroconversion. Those with intervals less than or equal to 31 days had an increased hazard of AIDS (RH 1.42, P = 0.07), which was reduced slightly after adjusting for baseline factors, calendar year of follow-up, treatment and the declining CD4 count, but there was no effect on survival. Thus, it appears that if information on acute seroconversion illness is not available, then analyses of progression to AIDS in seroconverter studies could use a short test interval as a proxy measure

About Smarandache-Multiplicative Functions

The main objective of this note is to introduce the notion of the S-multiplicative function and to give some simple properties concerning it. The name of S-multiplicative is short for Smarandache-multiplicative and reflects the main equation of the Smarandache function