The Flood Last Time: ‘Muck’ and the uses of history in Kara Walker’s ‘Rumination’ on Katrina

Kara Walker describes her book After the Deluge (2007) as “rumination” on Hurricane Katrina structured in the form of a “visual essay.” The book combines Walker's own artwork and the works of other artists into “a narrative of fluid symbols” in which the overarching analogy of “murky, toxic waters” holds the potential to “become the amniotic fluid of a potentially new and difficult birth.” This essay considers Walker's use of history within this collection of images to show how the book opens up ways to interrogate Katrina's particular significance as a wholly new, and yet eerily familiar, historical “event.” Nuancing a reading of Walker's book with reference to James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (1963), to which After the Deluge implicitly alludes, the essay examines Walker's artistic challenge to the notion that history is a narratable account of a past that precedes the present and demonstrates how that challenge encourages us to think about the potential uses of history within civil rights discourse after Katrina

Panel. Other Faulkners

Nothing Has Been Resolved: Mimesis and the Modern Dance Interpretations of As I Lay Dying / Michael P. Bibler, Manchester UniversityThis presentation introduces and discusses two important dramatic interpretations of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying: Jean-Louis Barrault’s avant-garde French production Autour d’une Mère (1935) and Valerie Bettis’s U.S. modern dance production As I Lay Dying (1949). Given the obvious emphasis on bodily expression, these interpretations raise interesting questions about the novel’s use of language and the difficulty (even impossibility) of mimetic representation. Yet my purpose here is not just to show how these dances help illustrate or illuminate Faulkner’s work. Rather, I’m more interested in exploring how these three works help decenter Faulkner’s place in the modernist canon by placing greater attention on questions of performance, intertextuality, and collaboration—questions already raised by the multi-vocal form of the novel itself. Toward a Camp Appreciation of Faulkner’s Sanctuary / Ben Robbins, Freie Universität BerlinI would like to argue that both Faulkner’s novel Sanctuary (1932) and the film treatments he made of the novel for MGM in the early 1930s can be read with a camp sensibility, since they possess many aesthetic hallmarks of camp, including heightened stylization, theatricality, amorality, exaggeration, failed seriousness, and a predilection towards artifice. I am particularly interested in exploring those moments where the novel particularly, to quote Susan Sontag in her landmark essay from 1964, ‘Notes on Camp’, “proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken seriously because it is ‘too much.’” I will show how a camp reading of Sanctuary can help us understand how the novel disturbs the high/low axes by which we judge the Faulknerian canon. William Faulkner and a Family Who Influenced Him / Sally Wolff-King, Emory UniversityWilliam Faulkner’s celebrated heroine of The Sound and the Fury, Caddy Compson, may have had a real-life antecedent. That is a theory mentioned in Ledgers of History: William Faulkner, an Almost Forgotten Friendship, and an Antebellum Plantation Diary. More evidence to support that argument has come to light since the publication of Ledgers of History, however, and research indicates that a cousin of the McCarroll/Francisco/Leak family could be that person. The McCarroll/Francisco/Leak family of Holly Springs and Salem, Mississippi, came into focus recently when it became clear that they inherited and preserved a nineteenth-century plantation diary, in their possession for several generations. What Faulkner discovered in the diary of long ago informed his fiction in myriad ways, including plot, characterization, theme, and detail. Leak/McCarroll/Francisco family stories, however, also seem to have found their way into plotlines of The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom! and The Unvanquished. That Faulkner drew from the real life around him has been well known since his lifetime, but the case seems stronger than ever that members of this particular family, whom he knew well and visited often, may have been—in ways not previously recognized—sources for some of Faulkner’s most famous novels

Sirens in command: the criminal femme fatale in American hardboiled crime fiction

This thesis challenges the traditional view of the 'femme fatale' as merely a dangerous and ravenous sexual predator who leads men into ruination. Critical, especially feminist, scholarship mostly regards the femme fatale as a sexist construction of a male fantasy and treats her as an expression of misogyny that ultimately serves to reaffirm male authority. But this thesis proposes alternative ways of viewing the femme fatale by showing how she can also serve as a figure for imagining female agency. As such, I focus on a particular character type that is distinct from the general archetype of the femme fatale because of the greater degree of agency she demonstrates. This 'criminal femme fatale' uses her sexual appeal and irresistible wiles both to manipulate men and to commit criminal acts, usually murder, in order to advance her goals with deliberate intent and full culpability. This thesis reveals and explains the agency of the criminal femme fatales in American Hardboiled crime fiction between the late 1920s and the end of World War II in the works of three authors: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain. The criminal femme fatales in the narratives of these authors show a subversive power and an ability to act - even though, or perhaps only if, this action is a criminal one. I show that these criminal femme fatales exhibit agency through their efforts to challenge not only the 'masculine' genre and the criminal space that this genre represents, but also to undercut the male protagonist's role and prove his failure in asserting control and dominance. Hammett's narratives provide good examples of how the criminal femme fatales function on a par with male gangsters in an underworld of crime and corruption. Chandler's work demonstrates a different case of absent/present criminal women who are set against the detective and ultimately question his power and mastery. Cain's narratives show the agency of the criminal femme fatales in the convergence between their ambition for social mobility and their sexual power over the male characters. To explain how these female characters exhibit agency, I situate this body of literature alongside contemporaneous legal and medical discourses on female criminality. I argue that the literary female criminal is a fundamentally different portrayal because she breaks the 'mad-bad' woman dichotomy that dominates both legal and medical discourses on female criminality. I show that the criminal femme fatales' negotiations of female agency within hardboiled crime fiction fluctuate and shift between the two poles of the criminalized and the medicalized women. These criminal femme fatales exhibit culpability in their actions that bring them into an encounter with the criminal justice system and resist being pathologized as women who suffer from a psychological ailment that affect their control. The thesis concludes that the ways in which the criminal femme fatales trouble normative socio-cultural conceptions relating to docile femininity and passive sexuality, not only destabilize the totality and fixity of the stereotype of the femme fatale in hardboiled crime fiction, but also open up broader debates about the representation of women in popular culture and the intersections between genre and gender.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Impact of Irradiation on Solvent used in SRS Waste Treatment Processes -9122

ABSTRACT Savannah River Site (SRS) will use a Caustic Side Solvent Extraction (CSSX) process to selectively remove radioactive Cs-137 from the caustic High Level Waste (HLW) salt solutions stored in the large carbon steel waste tanks in the SRS Tank Farm. This HLW resulted from several decades of operations at SRS to produce nuclear materials for the United States Government. The removed Cs-137 will be sent to the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF) where it will be immobilized along with the HLW sludges from the SRS Tank Farm into a borosilicate glass that will be put into permanent disposal. Currently the CSSX process is operating on an interim basis in the Modular Caustic Side Solvent Extraction Unit (MCU) facility. Eventually the process will occur in the full scale Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) currently being built. The organic solvent developed for the process is primarily a mixture of the Isopar ® L (a blend of C 10 -C 12 branched alkanes such as dodecane) and an alkyl aryl polyether added as a Modifier (commonly called Cs-7SB) to enhance the solubility of the extractant which is a calixarene-crown ether. The solvent also includes trioctylamine to mitigate the adverse impact of lipophilic agents on the stripping of the cesium into nitric acid. Since the mixture is primarily organic hydrocarbons, it is expected that radiolysis of the mixture with gamma rays and beta particles from the Cs-137 will produce the flammable gas H 2 and also eventually degrade the solvent. For example, much research has been performed on the radiolysis of the organic solvent used in the tributylphosphate (TPB) extraction process (PUREX process) that has been used at SRS and in many other countries for several decades to separate U and Pu from radioactive U-235 fission products such as Cs-137. [1] The purpose of this study was to investigate the radiolysis of the organic solvent for the CSSX process. Researchers at Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) irradiated samples of solvent with Co-60 gamma rays. Prior to the irradiation, the solvent was contacted with the aqueous solutions that will be used in the MCU and SWPF facilities. These were the aqueous caustic salt feed, the scrub solution, and wash water. The rates of radiolytic H 2 production were measured both by determining the composition of the gases produced and by measuring pressures produced during radiolysis. The irradiated solvents were then analyzed by various analytical techniques to assess how much of the Isopar ® L, the Modifier, and the extractant had decomposed

SLUDGE WASHING AND DEMONSTRATION OF THE DWPF FLOWSHEET IN THE SRNL SHIELDED CELLS FOR SLUDGE BATCH 5 QUALIFICATION

Sludge Batch 5 (SB5) is predominantly a combination of H-modified (HM) sludge from Tank 11 that underwent aluminum dissolution in late 2007 to reduce the total mass of sludge solids and aluminum being fed to the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF) and Purex sludge transferred from Tank 7. Following aluminum dissolution, the addition of Tank 7 sludge and excess Pu to Tank 51, Liquid Waste Operations (LWO) provided the Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) a 3-L sample of Tank 51 sludge for SB5 qualification. SB5 qualification included washing the sample per LWO plans/projections (including the addition of a Pu/Be stream from H Canyon), DWPF Chemical Process Cell (CPC) simulations, waste glass fabrication (vitrification), and waste glass chemical durability evaluation. This report documents: (1) The washing (addition of water to dilute the sludge supernatant) and concentration (decanting of supernatant) of the Tank 51 qualification sample to adjust sodium content and weight percent insoluble solids to Tank Farm projections. (2) The performance of a DWPF CPC simulation using the washed Tank 51 sample. This includes a Sludge Receipt and Adjustment Tank (SRAT) cycle, where acid is added to the sludge to destroy nitrite and remove mercury, and a Slurry Mix Evaporator (SME) cycle, where glass frit is added to the sludge in preparation for vitrification. The SME cycle also included replication of five canister decontamination additions and concentrations. Processing parameters for the CPC processing were based on work with a non radioactive simulant. (3) Vitrification of a portion of the SME product and Product Consistency Test (PCT) evaluation of the resulting glass. (4) Rheology measurements of the initial slurry samples and samples after each phase of CPC processing. This work is controlled by a Task Technical and Quality Assurance Plan (TTQAP) , and analyses are guided by an Analytical Study Plan. This work is Technical Baseline Research and Development (R&D) for the DWPF

Queer antiracism and the forgotten fiction of Murrell Edmunds, a Southern ‘Revolutionary'

Born to an aristocratic Virginia family, Murrell Edmunds (1898–1981) devoted his life to writing books that explicitly challenged the South's racial, sexual, and economic inequalities, yet his name is virtually nonexistent in the pages of literary history and criticism. Examining his novels Sojourn among Shadows (1936) and Time's Laughter in Their Ears (1946), this essay shows how Edmunds portrayed homoerotic intimacy between men as a queer force that turns alienation into a "useable affect" capable of fostering identifications among all oppressed people and thus impelling a liberal critique of the South's coercive mechanisms of categorization and exclusion. In addition to expanding modernist, Southern, and gay literary canons, Edmunds's work reveals new ways to understand the larger ideological connections between queerness, liberalism, and civil rights

Cotton's queer relations: same-sex intimacy and the literature of the southern plantation

Finally breaking through heterosexual cliches of flirtatious belles and cavaliers, sinister black rapists and lusty 'Jezebels', this book exposes the queer dynamics embedded in myths of the southern plantation