Moses and the Egyptian: Religious Authority in Olaudah Equiano\u27s Iteresting Narrative

From the first image that greeted readers of his book, Olaudah Equiano presented the self of his 1789 autobiographical narrative as a pious Christian, one whose religious conversion meant a kind of freedom as significant as his manumission from slavery. In the striking frontispiece portrait Equiano sits with biblical text in hand, insisting-in his visual as in his textual presentations of himself-that the Christianity he embraces is the defining feature of his life-story. He responds, as Susan Marren has suggested, to two paradoxical imperatives: one, to write himself into creation as a speaking subject and, two, to write an antislavery polemic (94). At the same time, the text speaks straightforwardly of a third authorial imperative as well. Within the religious tradition of Protestant Christianity, Equiano seeks to tell the story of his soul\u27s spiritual journey, to testify to God\u27s actions in his life.1 Contemporary readers have sometimes seen the author\u27s piety as something of a maneuver: The savvy African, knowing what his British and American audiences need in order to accept him as a credible narrator, uses religion as a mask for social critique. Others see him as wholly devoured (just as he feared he would literally be devoured when he saw the slave ship) by Western culture, losing his voice and himself to Christianity. Attempts to recognize the formidable forces of acculturation-of which religion is a profoundly important component-that take place over the course of Equiano\u27s Narrative have oversimplified and occasionally dismissed Equiano\u27s Christianity

Phillis Wheatley’s Abolitionist Text: The 1834 Edition

The problem presented to readers by the late eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley is nearly as well known as her poetry. Alongside many readers’ expressions of admiration, others have registered suspicion and disapproval, first in the eighteenth and then again in the mid- and late twentieth centuries. And nearly all of Wheatley’s critics acknowledge the centrality of the poet’s life in responses to her poetry. Whether the questions were framed in terms of literary authorship in the context of racist assumptions (as they were in the eighteenth century) or racial (as well as gendered) authenticity in the context of assumptions about piety and predictable conventions of neoclassical poetry (as they were in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries), Wheatley has disturbed reader’s expectations in her moment and in ours. My own undergraduate students, for instance, frequently recall Alice Walker’s Wheatley from their US schoolroom curriculum. Brilliant, isolated, enslaved and deeply conflicted about her race and self, Walker’s Wheatley (shaped at least in part by the Black Arts Movement’s hostile reception) embodies Virginia Woolf’s ‘contrary instincts’, a fraught and unfortunately iconic representation of black women’s creative expression. In the widely reprinted 1974 title essay of In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, Walker presents Phillis Wheatley as a young black girl combing the golden hair of both her white mistress and the classical goddess of virtue, providing one moment among many when Wheatley served a particular rhetorical function for readers, writers and activists in the trans-Atlantic cultural milieu that first established her as a literary celebrity in 1771

Retrieving the Complex Intracavity Pump Field of a Kerr Comb from the Through Port Data

A method of retrieving the complex intracavity pump field from the through port is proposed, and verified through characterizing the time-domain waveform of a mode-locked comb related to dark soliton formation in a normal-dispersion microresonator.Comment: 2 pages, 6 figure

Investigation of Mode Interaction in Optical Microresonators for Kerr Frequency Comb Generation

Mode interaction in silicon nitride micro-resonators is investigated. We provide clear experimental evidence of mode interaction between two family modes and mode interaction is demonstrated to be the cause of the comb generation in resonators with normal dispersion

Design and Fabrication of Terahertz Metallic Gratings on a Two-Wire Waveguide

In this study, we present the design, fabrication and experimental characterization of waveguide-integrated gratings operating at THz frequencie

Polarization proximity effect in isolator crystal pairs

We experimentally studied the polarization dynamics (orientation and ellipticity) of near infrared light transmitted through magnetooptic Yttrium Iron Garnet crystal pairs using a modified balanced detection scheme. When the pair separation is in the sub-millimeter range, we observed a proximity effect in which the saturation field is reduced by up to 20%. 1D magnetostatic calculations suggest that the proximity effect originates from magnetostatic interactions between the dipole moments of the isolator crystals. This substantial reduction of the saturation field is potentially useful for the realization of low-power integrated magneto-optical devices.Comment: submitted to Optics Letter

Terahertz Faraday rotation in a magnetic liquid: High magneto-optical figure of merit and broadband operation in a ferrofluid

We report on the demonstration of a high figure of merit (FOM) Faraday rotation in a liquid in the terahertz (THz) regime. Using a ferrofluid, a high broadband rotation (11 mrad/mm) is experimentally demonstrated in the frequency range of 0.2–0.9 THz at room temperature. Given the low absorption of the liquid, a high magneto-optical figure of merit (5-16 rad.cm/T) is obtained