Voicing Back: The Poetics and Politics of Ping Chong's Ethno-Historiographic Fables

In spite of Ping Chong¡¯s reputation in the American theatre scene, little has been done to explore his artistic works from a fully theorized perspective. In this dissertation, I propose a category of ¡°cultural narrative texts¡± to investigate cultural and historical themes of ¡°culture and the other¡± in Chong¡¯s fascinating ethno-historiographic fables. The poetics and politics of Chong¡¯s narrative texts are the subject of this dissertation. The frames of myth and narratology in their constructive aspects (how the mythic narratives are expressed) provide the poetics part. I adopt the literary approaches of Northrop Frye and Kenneth Burke for their intense studies on image (narrative unit), rhetoric (narrative signification), and emplotment (narrative sequence). In a connective linkage from poetics, the politics part engages the cultural and historical thematics through which I read what is expressed in Chong¡¯s (counter-) myths on people, cultures, and histories. For this complex thematic part, I construe a theoretical bricolage of a broad range of disciplines and methodologies, from psychoanalysis, cognitive science, anthropology, historiography, sociology, to poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and feminism.This dissertation deals with Chong¡¯s ethno-historiographic fables throughout his theatrical career over three decades, examining how his deconstructive myth-making wrestles with the problematic notion of ¡°the other¡± in both local (national) and global aspects. Borrowing Julia Kristeva¡¯s socially informed psychoanalysis, I approach Chong¡¯s concept of ¡°the other¡± as ¡°social abject¡± inhibiting at the margins. I argue that through Chong¡¯s (counter-) myth-making which destabilizes the authority of hegemonic narratives of the incompatible split between the self and the other, multiple voices of the marginalized return, and the monologue of the hegemonic culture is interrupted. In this dissertation, I demonstrate how the performance of Chong¡¯s (counter-) narratives, what I call ¡°voicing back,¡± resist the silence, enabling the marginalized abject to become the subjects of their own desires and histories. This ¡°voicing back¡± in its shared political languages of respect, equality, and justice (toward the others) prepares for the performance of a democracy which is based on the complete modes of speech acts, speaking and listening

Cooperative Game Theory within Multi-Agent Systems for Systems Scheduling

Research concerning organization and coordination within multi-agent systems continues to draw from a variety of architectures and methodologies. The work presented in this paper combines techniques from game theory and multi-agent systems to produce self-organizing, polymorphic, lightweight, embedded agents for systems scheduling within a large-scale real-time systems environment. Results show how this approach is used to experimentally produce optimum real-time scheduling through the emergent behavior of thousands of agents. These results are obtained using a SWARM simulation of systems scheduling within a High Energy Physics experiment consisting of 2500 digital signal processors.Comment: Fourth International Conference on Hybrid Intelligent Systems (HIS), Kitakyushu, Japan, December, 200

On the Steady State of Continuous Time Stochastic Opinion Dynamics with Power Law Confidence

This paper introduces a class of non-linear and continuous-time opinion dynamics model with additive noise and state dependent interaction rates between agents. The model features interaction rates which are proportional to a negative power of opinion distances. We establish a non-local partial differential equation for the distribution of opinion distances and use Mellin transforms to provide an explicit formula for the stationary solution of the latter, when it exists. Our approach leads to new qualitative and quantitative results on this type of dynamics. To the best of our knowledge these Mellin transform results are the first quantitative results on the equilibria of opinion dynamics with distance-dependent interaction rates. The closed form expressions for this class of dynamics are obtained for the two agent case. However the results can be used in mean-field models featuring several agents whose interaction rates depend on the empirical average of their opinions. The technique also applies to linear dynamics, namely with a constant interaction rate, on an interaction graph