Rape as an Element of Power Dominance in Nampally Road by Meena Alexander and Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

In the subaltern countries such as India and Africa, the form of government adapted or infused was that of the Colonial or European form of governance. For instance, during the colonial invasions in India and Africa the governance was changed or forced from the feudal system to the constitutional form of government. While the colonial form of governance has many positive aspects, the inhumane practice of rape was prominent to exhibit political dominance. In order to prove this practice of inhumane act two novels have been chosen for this research. One is Nampally Road by Meena Alexander that talks about the societal imbalance caused during the period of “Emergency act” and the other is Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi that deals with a period of three centuries starting from the “Slave Fugitive act” to post independence, where the plots depict the prominence of rape to exhibit power and control the natives.

(Re)thinking Postsocialism: Interview with Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora

Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora: We realized that the socialist legacies of each region connected them, as well as to other global sites. Postcolonial studies offered tools for understanding Soviet imperialism, yet came from regions with very different racialized, gendered, and sexualized dynamics of power that accompanied the European colonial form of economic domination. At the same time, postsocialist studies was actively excavating and engaging the impact of socialism on cultural and political life in Eastern Europe in a way that did not seem to gain traction as a way to understand the socialist commitments of newly independent governments in the third world who were non-aligned but initiated social welfare and redistribution policies to protect newly launched national economies, policies that continue in some places until the present.

Not a Subject but an End-Goal

This chapter discusses the status of citizenship education across three periods of New Zealand history. Each period is characterized by the competing educational debates of the day. The first period (Indigenous vs. Colonial, circa 1200AD-early 1900s) describes the contestation over land, citizenship, and education between the indigenous Māori and their British colonizers. Early in the 20th century, the traditional colonial form of schooling is challenged by a liberal progressive approach (Traditional Conservative vs. Liberal Progressive, 1900s-1970s). With the economic downturn of the 1970s the third era begins (New Right vs. Liberal Left, 1970s-present). In each period of history, the nature and status of education for citizenship has been a subject of debate with the outcome in the hands of the dominant ideology of the time. The tensions have not yet been resolved and while education for citizenship has always been an end-goal, it has never reached the status of a compulsory subject.

City of Inmates

Los Angeles incarcerates more people than any other city in the United States, which imprisons more people than any other nation on Earth. This book explains how the City of Angels became the capital city of the world’s leading incarcerator. Marshaling more than two centuries of evidence, historian Kelly Lytle Hernández unmasks how histories of native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and black disappearance drove the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles. In this telling, which spans from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Hernández documents the persistent historical bond between the racial fantasies of conquest, namely its settler colonial form, and the eliminatory capacities of incarceration. But City of Inmates is also a chronicle of resilience and rebellion, documenting how targeted peoples and communities have always fought back. They busted out of jail, forced Supreme Court rulings, advanced revolution across bars and borders, and, as in the summer of 1965, set fire to the belly of the city. With these acts those who fought the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles altered the course of history in the city, the borderlands, and beyond. This book recounts how the dynamics of conquest met deep reservoirs of rebellion as Los Angeles became the City of Inmates, the nation’s carceral core. It is a story that is far from over.

Moving Roots: A “Small Story” of Settler History and Home Places

In the early stages of research into the life of my great-great-grandfather, George Graham, I have repeatedly come across scraps of his life story relating to trees in various central city locations in Auckland, New Zealand, locations now abutting and on the university campus at which I work. These trees and places directly link me with George in powerful ways, becoming channels into affective responses of pride and excitement that also connect me viscerally to George’s role in the colonization of Auckland and dispossession of Māori. Here, I explore these affective states and the ways they provoke my thinking about being a descendant of settler colonizers and about my relation to my settler homeland. These material connections to colonial history “thicken” my relationship to Auckland and to the colonial story, and I use these experiences to point to the possibility of a different, “alter-colonial” form of settler relation to place.

Breakdown of coral colonial form under reduced pH conditions is initiated in polyps and mediated through apoptosis

Certain stony corals can alternate between a calcifying colonial form and noncalcifying solitary polyps, supporting the hypothesis that corals have survived through geologic timescale periods of unfavorable calcification conditions. However, the mechanisms enabling this biological plasticity are yet to be identified. Here we show that incubation of two coral species (Pocillopora damicornis and Oculina patagonica) under reduced pH conditions (pH 7.2) simulating past ocean acidification induce tissue-specific apoptosis that leads to the dissociation of polyps from coenosarcs. This in turn leads to the breakdown of the coenosarc and, as a consequence, to loss of coloniality. Our data show that apoptosis is initiated in the polyps and that once dissociation between polyp and coenosarc terminates, apoptosis subsides. After reexposure of the resulting solitary polyps to normal pH (pH 8.2), both coral species regenerated coenosarc tissues and resumed calcification. These results indicate that regulation of coloniality is under the control of the polyp, the basic modular unit of the colony. A mechanistic explanation for several key evolutionarily important phenomena that occurred throughout coral evolution is proposed, including mechanisms that permitted species to survive the third tier of mass extinctions.