The body unbound: ritual scarification and autobiographical forms in Wole Soyinka’s Aké: the years of childhood

The scarification in Aké is invested with major significance apropos Soyinka’s ideas on African subjectivity. Scarification among the Yoruba is one of the rites of passage associated with personal development. Scarification literally and metaphorically “opens” the person up socially and cosmically. Personal formation and self-realization are enabled by the Yoruba social code brought into being by its mythology. The meaning of the scarification incident in Aké is profoundly different. Determined by the form of autobiography which creates a self-constituting subject, the enabling Yoruba sociocultural context is elided. The story of Soyinka’s personal development is allegorical of the story of the development of the modern African subject. For Soyinka, the African subject is a rational subject whose constitution precludes the splitting of the scientific and spiritual which is a consequence of the Cartesian rupture. The African subject should be open to other subjects and the object world. Subjectivity constituted by the autobiographical mode closes off the opening up symbolically signalled by scarification.Web of Scienc

Africa on the British stage, 1955-1966

Covering the period between Reginald Craddock’s Night Returns to Africa (1955) and the staging of Wole Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel (1966), this chapter will examine key images of and from Africa as they were offered to British theatregoers. It will refer to dance, revues, and musicals as well as plays, and to the work of British dramatists as well as to that of African playwrights including Wole Soyinka, John Pepper Clark, and Guillaume Oyono-Mbia. Crucially, the chapter will focus on how such work was framed and received by theatre critics and within the press, suggesting some of the ways in which performances rooted in elements of ‘African’ culture may have exerted wider influences on and within the British theatrical establishment

Quinine, an old anti-malarial drug in a modern world: role in the treatment of malaria

Quinine remains an important anti-malarial drug almost 400 years after its effectiveness was first documented. However, its continued use is challenged by its poor tolerability, poor compliance with complex dosing regimens, and the availability of more efficacious anti-malarial drugs. This article reviews the historical role of quinine, considers its current usage and provides insight into its appropriate future use in the treatment of malaria. In light of recent research findings intravenous artesunate should be the first-line drug for severe malaria, with quinine as an alternative. The role of rectal quinine as pre-referral treatment for severe malaria has not been fully explored, but it remains a promising intervention. In pregnancy, quinine continues to play a critical role in the management of malaria, especially in the first trimester, and it will remain a mainstay of treatment until safer alternatives become available. For uncomplicated malaria, artemisinin-based combination therapy (ACT) offers a better option than quinine though the difficulty of maintaining a steady supply of ACT in resource-limited settings renders the rapid withdrawal of quinine for uncomplicated malaria cases risky. The best approach would be to identify solutions to ACT stock-outs, maintain quinine in case of ACT stock-outs, and evaluate strategies for improving quinine treatment outcomes by combining it with antibiotics. In HIV and TB infected populations, concerns about potential interactions between quinine and antiretroviral and anti-tuberculosis drugs exist, and these will need further research and pharmacovigilance

Bypass urbanism: Re-ordering center-periphery relations in Kolkata, Lagos and Mexico City

This paper introduces the concept of “bypass urbanism” to account for a process of urbanization that is reordering center-periphery relations of urban regions into new hierarchies. Bypass urbanism became visible through a comparison of large-scale urban transformations at the peripheries of Kolkata, Lagos, and Mexico City by zooming out and considering their impacts on the socio-spatial structure of the extended urban regions. Bypass urbanism is not emerging from the construction of a singular new town or real estate project, but is the result of the simultaneous development of an ensemble of various independent but related projects. Therefore, bypass urbanism usually does not emanate from a coherent planning initiative, even less so from a hidden “master plan” at the hands of any single developer or state agency, but it emerges through a convergence of interests over large areas of land at the geographical periphery of urban regions that have been made available for new urban developments by various measures. We understand bypass urbanism as a multidimensional process that includes material-geographical bypassing, the bypassing of regulatory frameworks, and socio-economic bypassing in everyday life. It results in the creation of exclusive and excluding spaces that enable middle and upper-class lifestyles, at the same time leading to the peripheralization of extant urban areas that are bypassed and neglected. The massive scale of bypass urbanism that we have observed represents a new quality of urban development resulting not in isolated urban enclaves or archipelagos, but in the fundamental restructuring of the extended urban region with far reaching and incalculable repercussions

Nicotinic acetylcholine receptor modulation of noradrenaline release in the rodent brain

Cognitive function in the brain is controlled by neurotransmitters whose release is tightly controlled. When normal levels are perturbed deficits in function can be observed both in humans and in animal models. The cholinergic system, acting via muscarinic or nicotinic receptors, modulates neurotransmitter release. The aim of this thesis was to investigate the identity of the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (nAChR) subtypes involved in modulating noradrenaline (NA) release, in rodent frontal cortex (FC) and hippocampus (HC). Comparisons were made both in vitro and in vivo using pharmacological tools. In vitro, acute application of nicotinic agonists evoked release of previously loaded [3H]-NA from prisms of rat FC and HC. There was a 2000-fold more potent response to β2* selective nAChR agonist 5-iodo-A85380 in FC than HC. A greater response to choline in HC than FC, combined with a lack of response to selective α7 ligands supports α3β4* nAChRs as the main mediator of nicotinic stimulated NA release in vitro in HC. A proportion of the release in each region was mediated via a potentially excitatory action of GABA. The profile of responses was unchanged after the acute or chronic administration of nicotine in vivo. In vivo microdialysis experiments were designed to test whether the nAChR subtype differences in vitro were representative of differences in vivo. 5-iodo-A85380 administered by reverse dialysis increased NA levels to a greater extent in FC than HC, supporting differences in the nAChR composition involved in NA regulation between these two regions. Targeted stimulation of these different nAChR subtypes could allow exploitation of this disparity to improve function with novel compounds such as those described in Chapter 2. Overall the studies described in this thesis show that there are differences in the subtype of nAChRs involved in NA release from terminal fields of FC and HC both in vitro and in vivo.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo