An Intellectual History of Black Literary Discourse 1910-1956

This dissertation examines the first forty-six years of black literary discourse in the American twentieth century. Beginning with Benjamin Brawley’s The Negro in Literature and Art (1910), I begin the dissertation by identifying black literary discourse’s original goal. In the parlance of the time, the goal of black literary discourse was to solve the “Negro Problem.” I then discuss how further into the twentieth century other critics and artists like James Weldon Johnson and Sterling Brown expanded on Brawley’s ideas in ways that attempted to get at the underlying philosophical thought that underpinned the Problem. By the 1930s a competing conceptual model that identified the organizing principle of black oppression differently would enter the field. The writers of New Challenge (1937) would argue that economic oppression was the organizing principle that should be at the forefront of black literature’s focus. These different conceptual models mirror the difference between left and far-left among black intellectuals after Harlem Renaissance. Each camp had its own set of ideas with respect to art, and these ideas would evolve in significant ways between the 1930s and the early-to-mid 1940s. The late 1940s would see different rhetoric emerge that was concerned with ambiguity and individualism. This would lead into the 1950s, a decade that began with the writers of Phylon championing works of black literature that leaned toward obscurity. Additionally, we also see within the pages of Phylon an investment in the figure of the black literary scholar. Ultimately, the argument of this dissertation is that through these 1 changes in black literary discourse, we see a shift in the relationship between literature and the broader social order. At the beginning of the twentieth century, literature was seen as a tool that can enable social change. Benjamin Brawley’s The Negro in Literature and Art makes this clear. However, by 1956, at the time Arthur P. Davis published “Integration and Race Literature” (1956), there was a sense that literature is a reward of social change

Funk What You Heard: Hip Hop Is a Field of Study

“Funk What You Heard” is a beaconing call to all scholars who engage with Hip Hop studies. This article lays out the ways in which Hip Hop studies should properly respond to the wave of oppressions currently pounding the world. With several key date markers in place for Hip Hop studies, Tricia Rose’s Black Noise in 1994 and Murray Foreman and Mark Anthony Neal’s That’s the Joint in 2004, “Funk What You Heard” charts the path forward for the future of Hip Hop studies. Black Noise provided the original blueprint for studying Hip Hop and That’s the Joint! stamped “hip-hop studies” into history. Although we are close to thirty years since Black Noise, lyrical analysis is a dominant method for Hip Hop studies. Also, although we have a clearly identifiable field, academics still treat Hip Hop as an interesting topic they can write about without speaking to the field. “Funk What You Heard” calls for something more. We can no longer continue down this path of weak analysis and rewriting Hip Hop theories that have been discussed time and time again. Our contemporary waves of oppression have raised the stakes. With the path charted out, we ultimately call on Hip Hop scholars to answer their ancestral call. Answering this call pragmatically looks like building on the field, developing new and innovative research methods, and engaging with all the elements of Hip Hop. As far as the unseen, we will leave that up to your reflection with Hip Hop’s collective consciousness that is not bound by space and time

ENSO-driven interhemispheric Pacific mass transports

Previous studies have shown that ENSO's anomalous equatorial winds, including the observed southward shift of zonal winds that occurs around the event peak, can be reconstructed with the first two Empirical Orthogonal Functions (EOFs) of equatorial region wind stresses. Using a high-resolution ocean general circulation model, we investigate the effect of these two EOFs on changes in warm water volume (WWV), interhemispheric mass transports, and Indonesian Throughflow (ITF). Wind stress anomalies associated with the first EOF produce changes in WWV that are dynamically consistent with the conceptual recharge oscillator paradigm. The ITF is found to heavily damp these WWV changes, reducing their variance by half. Wind stress anomalies associated with the second EOF, which depicts the southward wind shift, are responsible for WWV changes that are of comparable magnitude to those driven by the first mode. The southward wind shift is also responsible for the majority of the observed interhemispheric upper ocean mass exchanges. These winds transfer mass between the Northern and the Southern Hemisphere during El Niño events. Whilst water is transferred in the opposite direction during La Niña events, the magnitude of this exchange is roughly half of that seen during El Niño events. Thus, the discharging of WWV during El Niño events is meridionally asymmetric, while the WWV recharging during a La Niña event is largely symmetric. The inclusion of the southward wind shift is also shown to allow ENSO to exchange mass with much higher latitudes than that allowed by the first EOF alone

Estimating uncertainty in simulated ENSO statistics

Large ensembles of model simulations are frequently used to reduce the impact of internal variability when evaluating climate models and assessing climate change induced trends. However, the optimal number of ensemble members required to distinguish model biases and climate change signals from internal variability varies across models and metrics. Here we analyze the mean, variance and skewness of precipitation and sea surface temperature in the eastern equatorial Pacific region often used to describe the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), obtained from large ensembles of Coupled model intercomparison project phase 6 climate simulations. Leveraging established statistical theory, we develop and assess equations to estimate, a priori, the ensemble size or simulation length required to limit sampling‐based uncertainties in ENSO statistics to within a desired tolerance. Our results confirm that the uncertainty of these statistics decreases with the square root of the time series length and/or ensemble size. Moreover, we demonstrate that uncertainties of these statistics are generally comparable when computed using either pre‐industrial control or historical runs. This suggests that pre‐industrial runs can sometimes be used to estimate the expected uncertainty of statistics computed from an existing historical member or ensemble, and the number of simulation years (run duration and/or ensemble size) required to adequately characterize the statistic. This advance allows us to use existing simulations (e.g., control runs that are performed during model development) to design ensembles that can sufficiently limit diagnostic uncertainties arising from simulated internal variability. These results may well be applicable to variables and regions beyond ENSO

Evaluating climate models with the CLIVAR 2020 ENSO Metrics Package

El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the dominant mode of interannual climate variability on the planet, with far-reaching global impacts. It is therefore key to evaluate ENSO simulations in state-of-the-art numerical models used to study past, present, and future climate. Recently, the Pacific Region Panel of the International Climate and Ocean: Variability, Predictability and Change (CLIVAR) Project, as a part of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP), led a community-wide effort to evaluate the simulation of ENSO variability, teleconnections, and processes in climate models. The new CLIVAR 2020 ENSO metrics package enables model diagnosis, comparison, and evaluation to 1) highlight aspects that need improvement; 2) monitor progress across model generations; 3) help in selecting models that are well suited for particular analyses; 4) reveal links between various model biases, illuminating the impacts of those biases on ENSO and its sensitivity to climate change; and to 5) advance ENSO literacy. By interfacing with existing model evaluation tools, the ENSO metrics package enables rapid analysis of multipetabyte databases of simulations, such as those generated by the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phases 5 (CMIP5) and 6 (CMIP6). The CMIP6 models are found to significantly outperform those from CMIP5 for 8 out of 24 ENSO-relevant metrics, with most CMIP6 models showing improved tropical Pacific seasonality and ENSO teleconnections. Only one ENSO metric is significantly degraded in CMIP6, namely, the coupling between the ocean surface and subsurface temperature anomalies, while the majority of metrics remain unchanged

Dynamics and predictability of El Nino-Southern Oscillation: an Australian perspective on progress and challenges

Many scientific challenges remain for managing the risk of future ENSO impacts in countries like Australia that are strongly affected by ENSO event diversity

Quantifying Southern Annular Mode paleo-reconstruction skill in a model framework

Past attempts to reconstruct the Southern Annular Mode (SAM) using paleo-archives have resulted in records which can differ significantly from one another prior to the window over which the proxies are calibrated. This study attempts to quantify not only the skill with which we may expect to reconstruct the SAM but also to assess the contribution of regional bias in proxy selection and the impact of non-stationary proxy–SAM teleconnections on a resulting reconstruction. This is achieved using a pseudoproxy framework with output from the GFDL CM2.1 global climate model. Reconstructions derived from precipitation fields perform better, with 89 % of the reconstructions calibrated over a 61 year window able to reproduce at least 50 % of the inter-annual variance in the SAM, as opposed to just 25 % for surface air temperature (SAT)-derived reconstructions. Non-stationarity of proxy–SAM teleconnections, as defined here, plays a small role in reconstructions, but the range in reconstruction skill is not negligible. Reconstructions are most likely to be skilful when proxies are sourced from a geographically broad region with a network size of at least 70 proxies