The Slave Narrative Tradition in Lawrence Hill’sThe Book of Negroes

Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes (2007) is an important revisionist work that simultaneously adheres to and undermines the slave narrative genre. Hill infuses the novel with an historical and generic intelligence that allows him to generally maintain the slave narrative story-form while undercutting those thematic features that have created racial mythologies, presenting a genuine fiction that “writes back” to the textual history of the slave narrative. For example, Hill’s narrator, Aminata Diallo, writes her memoir in the company of campaigning abolitionists who pressure her to make her story conform to both the pre-existing model and their manumission campaign. She complains of interference and chooses to set down her narrative independent of their leadership. Hill therefore circumvents the abolitionists’ partial censorship and simultaneously draws attention to it

"The Book of Negroes’ illustrated edition: circulating African-Canadian history through the Middlebrow"

This article examines the 2009 deluxe illustrated edition of Lawrence Hill’s Commonwealth Writers’ Prize– and Canada Reads–winning novel The Book of Negroes, originally published in 2007. It relates the story of Aminata, a West African girl kidnapped and sold into slavery, and her experiences on an indigo plantation in the American south, followed by further displacements to Charleston, Nova Scotia, Sierra Leone, and London. In New York, as the Revolutionary War comes to a close, Aminata becomes the scribe for the Book of Negroes, documenting the Black Loyalists, as well as the slaves and indentured servants of white Loyalists, granted passage by the British to Canada. Hill has commented that the Book of Negroes is an important document about which Canadians are largely ignorant. This desire to circulate knowledge about African-Canadian history through the novel is particularly manifest in the illustrated edition of 2009, where a photograph of the Book of Negroes features prominently, along with countless other images and captions which supplement and interrupt Hill’s narrative. This article considers the significance and implications of this “keepsake” or “souvenir” edition, particularly its circulation of knowledge about African-Canadian history through visual pleasure

Allocating HIV Prevention Funds in the United States: Recommendations from an Optimization Model

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had an annual budget of approximately $327 million to fund health departments and community-based organizations for core HIV testing and prevention programs domestically between 2001 and 2006. Annual HIV incidence has been relatively stable since the year 2000 [1] and was estimated at 48,600 cases in 2006 and 48,100 in 2009 [2]. Using estimates on HIV incidence, prevalence, prevention program costs and benefits, and current spending, we created an HIV resource allocation model that can generate a mathematically optimal allocation of the Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention’s extramural budget for HIV testing, and counseling and education programs. The model’s data inputs and methods were reviewed by subject matter experts internal and external to the CDC via an extensive validation process. The model projects the HIV epidemic for the United States under different allocation strategies under a fixed budget. Our objective is to support national HIV prevention planning efforts and inform the decision-making process for HIV resource allocation. Model results can be summarized into three main recommendations. First, more funds should be allocated to testing and these should further target men who have sex with men and injecting drug users. Second, counseling and education interventions ought to provide a greater focus on HIV positive persons who are aware of their status. And lastly, interventions should target those at high risk for transmitting or acquiring HIV, rather than lower-risk members of the general population. The main conclusions of the HIV resource allocation model have played a role in the introduction of new programs and provide valuable guidance to target resources and improve the impact of HIV prevention efforts in the United States

The 2.5 m Telescope of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

We describe the design, construction, and performance of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Telescope located at Apache Point Observatory. The telescope is a modified two-corrector Ritchey-Chretien design which has a 2.5-m, f/2.25 primary, a 1.08-m secondary, a Gascoigne astigmatism corrector, and one of a pair of interchangeable highly aspheric correctors near the focal focal plane, one for imaging and the other for spectroscopy. The final focal ratio is f/5. The telescope is instrumented by a wide-area, multiband CCD camera and a pair of fiber-fed double spectrographs. Novel features of the telescope include: (1) A 3 degree diameter (0.65 m) focal plane that has excellent image quality and small geometrical distortions over a wide wavelength range (3000 to 10,600 Angstroms) in the imaging mode, and good image quality combined with very small lateral and longitudinal color errors in the spectroscopic mode. The unusual requirement of very low distortion is set by the demands of time-delay-and-integrate (TDI) imaging; (2) Very high precision motion to support open loop TDI observations; and (3) A unique wind baffle/enclosure construction to maximize image quality and minimize construction costs. The telescope had first light in May 1998 and began regular survey operations in 2000.Comment: 87 pages, 27 figures. AJ (in press, April 2006

Disability, normalcy, and the failures of the nation: a reading of selected fiction by Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Indra Sinha, and Firdaus Kanga

This thesis is a study of representations of disability in a selection of Anglophone Indian literature written between 1981 and 2006. In this thesis, I argue that, in fiction by Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Indra Sinha, and Firdaus Kanga, disability often takes on positive symbolic value as it represents the potential for the postcolonial polis to survive and thrive, but that the ultimate death or medical normalisation of disabled characters in many of these narratives is tied to a loss of political optimism. While these texts in many instances disturb norms surrounding able-bodiedness and disability, they often ultimately narrate a pessimistic conformity to scripts of normalization, and in so doing, map the unjust triumph of a prescriptive national or international politics onto a prescriptive politics of the body. As disability is eliminated, so is the potential for resistance to latent colonial or hegemonic forms. On the other hand, those fictions that narrate a sustainable disabled presence suggest the potential for the community or nation to emerge from oppressive social structures unscathed. I focus on applying literary disability scholarship to Indian novels which demand scrutiny through a disability studies lens, given their dependence upon the disabled body as a metaphoric object and the continuities in their disability representation and the representation of history. While the focus of my work is upon the nuances of disability representation as it is used to parallel the rise (and sometimes fall) of political optimism in these examples of Anglophone Indian literature, I also read toward an understanding of how the postcolonial perspective of these fictions may inflect and complicate disability representations, and investigate Western notions of normalcy as they are represented as intruding upon this literature and as disciplining the body in these texts. This disciplining is further explored through an ancillary reading of how medical apparatus and infrastructure, such as hospitals, ambulances, and especially doctors, are represented in this group of novels, as it is often in conjunction with the medical establishment that disabled characters are subjected to (neo) colonial violence. In the first chapter, which takes the form of a critical introduction, I discuss the terms of my argument within the development of disability studies, and position myself within the debates and concerns of literary disability studies in particular. I consider the antecedents and development of what is now called the cultural model of disability, and discuss how literary disability scholarship, which began its development with a focus on Western texts and contexts, has begun to extend its range of inquiry to become global in scope. I consider examples of the interplay of contemporary Indian history with biopolitical ideals and the paradigm of normalcy as it has been articulated by Lennard Davis and his intellectual predecessors including Canguillheim and Foucault. In the second chapter, which is entitled "The Medical and the Monstrous: Disability in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Shame, and The Moor’s Last Sigh," I consider how the disabled body is created as an object of competition in an ideological agon between a violent, globalized modernity and a sometimes-idealized fictive past. While Rushdie often represents the disabled body in a very simplified and rather bigoted register, he also to some extent engages with the more complex potentialities of disability to represent the failure of the state. The normalizing perpetration of a Westernized medical apparatus against disabled people becomes the proof and of political disintegration and the dissolution of hope for the emergent nation, whether in Rushdie’s fictional version of India or Pakistan. In the third chapter, "Disability and the Realization of Metaphor in Rohinton Mistry's Such a Long Journey and A Fine Balance," I consider Rohinton Mistry's disability representations in relation to his engagement with the tradition of European realism. While Mistry attempts to re-locate the normal type articulated by the European novel, and subverts the conventions of European fiction even as he employs them, he still depends upon a largely uncontested tradition of disability representation. While he re-locates the norm in many demographic respects, he does not fully manage to rescue disability from an ancillary and symbolic role in the fiction. Mistry uses disabled characters symbolically to imagine political upheaval from a disadvantaged and sometimes from a subaltern position, creating in disabled characters their symbolic correlates. In my fourth chapter, "Collective Disability and the Dis-located Norm in Indra Sinha's Animal's People," I consider the ways in which this novel effaces paradigms of normalcy by imagining an environment in which disability is the unifying commonality of community life. While Mistry and Rushdie ultimately write disability as narrative anomaly in the ways described by Mitchell and Snyder, Sinha inverts the paradigm of the anomalous body in his fictional representation of the Bhopal disaster. The failure of the Indian state to protect its citizenry results in collective disability identification, while those able-bodied individuals who might be treated as normal in another fiction become suspicious outsiders. In my fifth chapter, "Unaccommodating Fictions: Disability, Authorship, and the Politics of Failure in Firdaus Kanga's Trying to Grow," I consider the ways in which gay, disabled, Parsi writer Firdaus Kanga represents failure and dependency as character weakness. Kanga validates neoliberal competition by re-imagining the potential for economic and social attainment as properties of mind at the exclusion of the body, and, in so doing, inaugurates an adaption of paradigms of normalcy. Kanga's imaginary valorises the economically competitive individual, but simply removes the constraint of bodily normalcy from this ideal marketable man. For Kanga, economic freedom from parental, societal, or governmental intervention is edifying, as masculinity is achieved through uninhibited competition. In my conclusion, "Good Doctors and Bad Doctors in Rushdie, Mistry, Sinha, and Kanga," I consider the representation of the clinic and of physicians in addition to the representation of disabled people in the novels included in this thesis. Doctors and medical apparatus become symbolic correlates for different political impositions and political strategies, often representing the abuses and failures of government or of public policy. I will frame my discussion within Foucault's concept of the clinic, and will consider the ways in which traditional and Western medicine take on symbolic meaning in these fictions of India.</p

Structure and Dynamics of the Interior of the Sun and Sun-like Stars

s SOHO 6/GONG 98 Workshop Structure and Dynamics of the Interior of the Sun and Sun-like Stars 1-4 June 1998 Boston Park Plaza Hotel, Boston, USA Scientific Organizing Committee Bo Andersen (NSC, Norway) Sarbani Basu (Princeton, USA) Timothy Brown (HAO/NCAR, USA) Frank Hill (GONG/NSO, USA) Sylvain Korzennik (SAO, USA; Chairman) Alexander Kosovichev (Stanford, USA) Robert Noyes (SAO, USA) Sylvaine Turck-Chieze (CEA/Saclay, France) Local Organizing Committee Fr&apos;ed&apos;eric Baudin Stephanie Deeley Edward Deluca Antonio Eff-Darwich Sylvain Korzennik, Chairman Peter Nisenson Han Uitenbroek Aad Vanballegooijen Sara Yorke Andrew Wilson (Proceedings Editor) Editor&apos;s Note Camera-ready hardcopy papers for the Proceedings (SP--418) should be handed at the Workshop to the ESA Editor. Authors without their camera-ready paper must contact the Editor at the Workshop; otherwise they may not be included in the proceedings, with the exception of the working session reports. Andrew Wilson ESA Publicatio..