bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Interventional treatment of renal angiomyolipoma: immediate results and clinical and radiological follow-up of 4.5 years
Authors: Andersen Poul Erik , Thorlund Mie Gaedt , Wennevik Gjertrud Egge , Pedersen Rune Lau , Lund Lars
Published: July 2015

Background

Renal angiomyolipoma is rare, but many of these patients may have an acute debut with severe bleeding. These patients need urgent treatment with interventional embolization as an attractive option.

Purpose

To investigate the technical and clinical effect of this treatment and to evaluate long-term clinical outcomes with clinical control and radiological imaging.

Material and Methods

Eight patients with angiomyolipoma were treated with embolization. Five patients were treated acutely. Five patients were followed-up for mean 4.5 years with clinical and radiological examinations.

Results

The renal angiomyolipoma decreased significantly from mean 7.2 cm to 2.9 cm after embolization ( p = 0.04). Cortical infarctions of about one-third of the circumference of the embolized kidneys could be detected on follow-up examinations, but all patients had normal total kidney function. The bleeding was primarily stopped in all patients, however, in one patient bleeding from a lumbar artery was supplementary embolized within 24 h. In another case the interventional procedure ended up in embolization of the whole kidney as it was impossible to embolize all the feeding arteries selectively. One patient had a nephrectomy one month after embolization because of infection and re-bleeding and one patient after 2.5 years because of tumor size >4 cm. The technical success was 7/8 (88%) and clinical success was 6/8 patients (75%).

Conclusion

Selective embolization of renal angiomyolipoma is a minimally invasive and safe procedure with few complications. It is a nephron sparing alternative to renal resection. The reduction in tumor size after embolization is significant and long-lasting.
Workplace Lactation Programs
Authors: Mills Susan Polston
Published: July 2015

Employers play a critical role in mothers' success with breastfeeding when these women work full-time. Employers need information on the benefits breastfeeding can provide for working mothers and businesses. This article discusses current legislation and policies supporting mothers' ability to breastfeed in the workplace, the benefits of breastfeeding to the employer, mother, and child, and the need for employers to understand the benefits of breastfeeding. Finally, the role of occupational health nurses in facilitating the success of breastfeeding mothers through the development and implementation of a lactation program is explicated.
Risk Factors for Occupational Osteoarthritis
Authors: Aluoch Marilyn A. , Wao Hesborn O. , Berryman Phyllis , Lukes Eileen
Published: July 2015

Sixteen articles published between 1987 and 2008 regarding work-related activities as risk factors for osteoarthritis of the knee, hand, foot, hip, and cervical spine were chronologically reviewed. Despite challenges (e.g., nonresponse bias, inadequate sample size, and retrospective exposure assessment), the review findings indicated a strong relationship between physical strain experienced while performing physically demanding jobs and the incidence of osteoarthritis. This conclusion informs occupational health nurses' work and design of work policies.
The Roles of the Occupational Health Nurse and Infection Control in Managing a Novel H1N1 Surge—Lessons from the Front Line
Authors: Hood Joyce , LaCoe Lisa , Childre Frances
Published: July 2015

The sudden appearance of the novel H1N1 influenza virus in North America highlights the importance of planning for such an event. Although the severity of this influenza is currently low, many lessons can be learned from the initial response by health care organizations.
Malaria
Authors: Tompkins Olga S.
Published: July 2015

For international business travelers, malaria is a serious and sometimes fatal vector-borne disease that is largely preventable with effective counseling and proper use of a prescribed antimalarial.
Respiratory Protection—Preparing for H1N1 Influenza
Authors: Litchfield Sheila M.
Published: July 2015

This article alerts occupational health nurses to the issuance of new guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Protection regarding respiratory protection when in contact with patients with confirmed or suspected H1N1 virus infection. Additionally, guidance from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is provided for situations in which employers are unable to obtain sufficient supplies of disposable N95 respirators for which their personnel have been fit-tested.
Gestational Weight Gain to Promote Optimal Outcomes
Authors: Chalupka Stephanie
Published: July 2015

How much weight women gain during pregnancy, and their weight at conception, can affect their health and that of their babies.
A New Occupational Safety and Health Administration Directive regarding H1N1 Influenza in the Workplace
Authors: Litchfield Sheila M.
Published: July 2015

This article addresses the following aspects of a new Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) directive associated with H1N1 in the workplace: the recordability of H1N1 exposure in the workplace; the need for employers to have a pandemic plan that addresses the identification and management of H1N1 exposure risk to employees; the respiratory protection requirements of an exposure control plan; OSHA workplace inspections in response to exposure complaints or fatalities associated with H1N1; and the availability of OSHA compliance guidance for employers.
Medications in the Workplace
Authors: Litchfield Sheila M.
Published: July 2015

This article provides guidance and web-based resources regarding two frequent practice issues associated with medications in the workplace: dispensing of over-the-counter (OTC) medications in the occupational health setting, and the proper disposal of expired or otherwise unwanted prescription and nonprescription medications.
The Professional Association and Practice Excellence
Authors: Lukes Eileen , Moore Pamela V.
Published: July 2015

Nursing practice in occupational settings is different from nursing practice in acute care settings. Due to the sparse professional practice resources available to most occupational health nurses at the worksite, belonging to the professional association is important for support and knowledge enhancement needed to maintain practice excellence and credibility.
Critical evaluation of glass forming ability criteria
Authors: Chattopadhyay C. , Satish Idury K. S. N. , Bhatt J. , Mondal K. , Murty B. S.
Published: July 2015

The available glass forming ability criteria have been examined by classifying them into four basic categories depending on critical temperatures, thermodynamic quantities, topological and kinetic aspects of glass forming alloys. A large number of glass forming alloys of widely varying natures and origin have been analysed with their experimentally measured properties to assess their glass forming ability. A novel approach using kinetic viscosity of glass forming alloys obtained by the Vogel–Fulcher–Tamman equation and the critical cooling rate calculated from the TTT diagram is demonstrated as an excellent universal glass forming ability criterion. Moreover, thermodynamic and topological modelling results through computation of a novel PHSS parameter for various alloy compositions spanning different alloy systems have rendered qualitative guidelines on propensity for glass formation in multicomponent alloy systems. Besides, the importance of kinetic interpretation of PHSS range observed for glass forming alloys is also elaborated.
Cu1.94S-Assisted Growth of Wurtzite CuInS2 Nanoleaves by In Situ Copper Sulfidation
Authors: Cai Chunqi , Zhai Lanlan , Zou Chao , Li Zhensong , Zhang Lijie , Yang Yun , Huang Shaoming
Published: July 2015

Wurtzite CuInS2 nanoleaves were synthesized by Cu1.94S-assisted growth. By observing the evolution of structures and phases during the growth process, Cu1.94S nanocrystals were found to be formed after uninterrupted oxidation and sulfidation of copper nanoparticles at the early stage, serving as catalysts to introduce the Cu and In species into CuInS2 nanoleaves growth for inherent property of fast ionic conductor. The obtained CuInS2 nanoleaves were characterized by scanning transmission electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, fast Fourier transform, X-ray diffraction, and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy mapping. The enhancement of photoresponsive current of CuInS2 nanoleaf film, evaluated by I-V curves of nanoleaf film, is believed to be attributed to the fast carrier transport benefit from the nature of single crystalline of CuInS2 nanoleaves.
Capacitance-Voltage Characteristics of Thin-film Transistors Fabricated with Solution-Processed Semiconducting Carbon Nanotube Networks
Authors: Cai Le , Zhang Suoming , Miao Jinshui , Wei Qinqin , Wang Chuan
Published: July 2015

We report the capacitance-voltage (C-V) measurements on thin-film transistors (TFTs) using solution-processed semiconducting carbon nanotube networks with different densities and channel lengths. From the measured C-V characteristics, gate capacitance and field-effect mobility (up to ~50 cm2 V−1 s−1) of the TFTs were evaluated with better precision compared with the results obtained from calculated gate capacitance. The C-V characteristics measured under different frequencies further enabled the extraction and analysis of the interface trap density at the nanotube-dielectric layer interface, which was found to increase significantly as the network density increases. The results presented here indicate that C-V measurement is a powerful tool to assess the electrical performance and to investigate the carrier transport mechanism of TFTs based on carbon nanotubes.
Cpipe: a shared variant detection pipeline designed for diagnostic settings
Authors: Sadedin Simon P. , Dashnow Harriet , James Paul A. , Bahlo Melanie , Bauer Denis C. , Lonie Andrew , Lunke Sebastian , Macciocca Ivan , Ross Jason P. , Siemering Kirby R. , Stark Zornitza , White Susan M. ,   Melbourne Genomics Health Alliance, Taylor Graham , Gaff Clara , Oshlack Alicia , Thorne Natalie P.
Published: July 2015

The benefits of implementing high throughput sequencing in the clinic are quickly becoming apparent. However, few freely available bioinformatics pipelines have been built from the ground up with clinical genomics in mind. Here we present Cpipe, a pipeline designed specifically for clinical genetic disease diagnostics. Cpipe was developed by the Melbourne Genomics Health Alliance, an Australian initiative to promote common approaches to genomics across healthcare institutions. As such, Cpipe has been designed to provide fast, effective and reproducible analysis, while also being highly flexible and customisable to meet the individual needs of diverse clinical settings. Cpipe is being shared with the clinical sequencing community as an open source project and is available at http://cpipeline.org.
Greening as compensation to production of environmental public goods: how do common rules have an influence at local level? The case of durum wheat in Italy
Authors: Diotallevi Francesco , Blasi Emanuele , Franco Silvio
Published: July 2015

The promotion of sustainability is envisaged by the new Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) as a major issue for future policies in the agro-food sector, in line with the Europe 2020 Strategy. In this context, “greening” ecological payments have been conceived as a tool to encourage European farms towards the adoption of environmentally friendly practices. Since the new CAP became law, at least 30% of the national budget of direct payments is tied to the respect of three main ecological commitments by farmers managing 10 or more hectares of arable land, i.e. crop diversification, maintaining permanent grassland and maintaining the so called “ecological focus areas”.

The present research focuses on the possible effects of the greening instrument, by evaluating the impact of this tool in different Italian areas, specialized in the durum wheat cultivation. The objectives of the analysis are to evaluate the extent and features of the impact of greening in three case study areas and to discuss the likely implications in a policy-effectiveness perspective.

Thus, an empirical analysis has been carried out in order to evaluate the impact of greening in three case study areas with a strong specialization in wheat production, located in the North, Centre and South of Italy.The results have been compared across the case studies and with other quantitative and qualitative studies carried out in different contexts.

The results show that the impact of greening may be different even in areas with the same productive specialization. Namely, greening deeply impacts on the durum wheat cultivation area located in the South of Italy, while it seems to have a very marginal effect on the other two areas. Thus, greening has a strongly differentiated impact both at the farm and at the territorial level, at least for the Italian durum wheat production.

Basing on these first results, the setting of specific solutions to rebalance the effects of greening on the durum wheat sector is envisaged, as allowed by the present regulatory framework, in order to avoid an over-diversification in the impacts of the greening measure among different Italian regions.
Proteomic analysis of broccoli (Brassica oleracea) under high temperature and waterlogging stresses
Authors: Lin Hsin-Hung , Lin Kuan-Hung , Chen Su-Ching , Shen Yu-Hsing , Lo Hsiao-Feng
Published: July 2015

Background

The production of broccoli (Brassica oleracea) is largely reduced by waterlogging and high temperature stresses. Heat-tolerant and heat-susceptible broccoli cultivars TSS-AVRDC-2 and B-75, respectively, were used for physiological and proteomic analyses. The objective of this study was to identify TSS-AVRDC-2 and B-75 proteins differentially regulated at different time periods in response to waterlogging at 40 °C for three days.

Results

TSS-AVRDC-2 exhibited significantly higher chlorophyll content, lower stomatal conductance, and better H2O2 scavenging under stress in comparison to B-75. Two-dimensional liquid phase fractionation analyses revealed that Rubisco proteins in both varieties were regulated under stressing treatments, and that TSS-AVRDC-2 had higher levels of both Rubisco large and small subunit transcripts than B-75 when subjected to high temperature and/or waterlogging.

Conclusions

This report utilizes physiological and proteomic approaches to discover changes in the protein expression profiles of broccoli in response to heat and waterlogging stresses. Higher levels of Rubisco proteins in TSS-AVRDC-2 could lead to increased carbon fixation efficiency to provide sufficient energy to enable stress tolerance under waterlogging at 40 °C.
Hospitalization Rates Among Survivors of Young Adult Malignancies
Authors: Richardson Devon P. , Daly Corinne , Sutradhar Rinku , Paszat Lawrence F. , Wilton Andrew S. , Rabeneck Linda , Baxter Nancy N.
Published: July 2015

Purpose

There are limited data on health care use among survivors of young adult cancers. We aimed to describe patterns of hospitalization among a cohort of long-term survivors compared with noncancer controls.

Methods

Persons diagnosed between the ages of 20 and 44 years with malignancies in Ontario, Canada, from 1992 to 1999, who lived at least 5 years recurrence free, were identified using the Ontario Cancer Registry and matched to noncancer controls. Hospitalizations were determined using hospital discharges, and rates were compared between survivors and controls. The absolute excess rate of hospitalizations was determined for each type of malignancy in survivors per 100 person-years of follow-up.

Results

The cohort included 20,275 survivors and 101,344 noncancer controls. During the study period, 6,948 (34.3%) survivors were admitted to the hospital and the adjusted relative rate (ARR) of hospitalizations in survivors compared with controls was 1.51 (95% CI, 1.48 to 1.54). The rate of hospitalization was highest for survivors of upper GI, leukemia, and urologic malignancies. The hospitalization rate (per person) for survivors significantly decreased from 0.22 in the first time period examined (5 to 8 years after diagnosis) to 0.15 in the last time period examined (18 to 20 years after diagnosis, P < .0001). However, at all time periods, survivors were more likely to be hospitalized than controls (ARR at 5 to 8 years, 1.67 [95% CI, 1.57 to 1.81]; ARR at 18 to 20 years, 1.22 [95% CI, 1.08 to 1.37]).

Conclusion

Survivors of young adult cancers have an increased rate of hospitalization compared with controls. The rate of hospitalization for 20-year survivors did not return to baseline, indicating a substantial and persistent burden of late effects among this generally young population.
Recommendations for the Use of WBC Growth Factors: American Society of Clinical Oncology Clinical Practice Guideline Update
Authors: Smith Thomas J. , Bohlke Kari , Lyman Gary H. , Carson Kenneth R. , Crawford Jeffrey , Cross Scott J. , Goldberg John M. , Khatcheressian James L. , Leighl Natasha B. , Perkins Cheryl L. , Somlo George , Wade James L. , Wozniak Antoinette J. , Armitage James O.
Published: July 2015

Purpose

To update the 2006 American Society of Clinical Oncology guideline on the use of hematopoietic colony-stimulating factors (CSFs).

Methods

The American Society of Clinical Oncology convened an Update Committee and conducted a systematic review of randomized clinical trials, meta-analyses, and systematic reviews from October 2005 through September 2014. Guideline recommendations were based on the review of the evidence by the Update Committee.

Results

Changes to previous recommendations include the addition of tbo-filgrastim and filgrastim-sndz, moderation of the recommendation regarding routine use of CSFs in older patients with diffuse aggressive lymphoma, and addition of recommendations against routine dose-dense chemotherapy in lymphoma and in favor of high–dose-intensity chemotherapy in urothelial cancer. The Update Committee did not address recommendations regarding use of CSFs in acute myeloid leukemia or myelodysplastic syndromes in adults.

Recommendations

Prophylactic use of CSFs to reduce the risk of febrile neutropenia is warranted when the risk of febrile neutropenia is approximately 20% or higher and no other equally effective and safe regimen that does not require CSFs is available. Primary prophylaxis is recommended for the prevention of febrile neutropenia in patients who are at high risk on the basis of age, medical history, disease characteristics, and myelotoxicity of the chemotherapy regimen. Dose-dense regimens that require CSFs should only be used within an appropriately designed clinical trial or if supported by convincing efficacy data. Current recommendations for the management of patients exposed to lethal doses of total-body radiotherapy, but not doses high enough to lead to certain death as a result of injury to other organs, include the prompt administration of CSFs.
Tourette Syndrome research highlights 2014
Authors: Richards Cheryl A , Black Kevin J
Published: July 2015

About 200 journal articles reported research on Tourette syndrome and other tic disorders in 2014. Here we briefly summarize a few of the reports that seemed most important or interesting, ranging from animal models to human studies. Readers can comment on our choices or provide their own favorites using the tools on the online article.
The Composition of Optimally Wise Crowds
Authors: Davis-Stober Clintin P. , Budescu David V. , Broomell Stephen B. , Dana Jason
Published: July 2015

We investigate optimal group member configurations for producing a maximally accurate group forecast. Our approach accounts for group members that may be biased in their forecasts and/or have errors that correlate with the criterion values being forecast. We show that for large forecasting groups, the diversity of individual forecasts linearly trades off with forecaster accuracy when determining optimal group composition.
On Modeling Stochastic Travel and Service Times in Vehicle Routing
Authors: Gómez Andrés , Mariño Ricardo , Akhavan-Tabatabaei Raha , Medaglia Andrés L. , Mendoza Jorge E.
Published: July 2015

Vehicle routing problems with stochastic travel and service times (VRPSTT) consist of designing transportation routes of minimal expected cost over a network where travel and service times are represented by random variables. Most of the existing approaches for VRPSTT are conceived to exploit the properties of the distributions assumed for the random variables. Therefore, these methods are tied to a given family of distributions and subject to strong modeling assumptions. We propose an alternative way to model travel and service times in VRPSTT without making many assumptions regarding such distributions. To illustrate our approach, we embed it into a state-of-the-art routing engine and use it to conduct experiments on instances with different travel and service time distributions.
Importance of monitoring stool output in an Ebola virus disease patient
Authors: Robson Robin , Najad Shahla
Published: July 2015

British military health professionals are currently deployed in Sierra Leone to provide frontline medical assistance to international health workers caring for people infected with the Ebola virus disease (EVD). The Armed Forces' main effort is to provide support that will give volunteers and local health workers the confidence that they will be supported clinically, should they themselves contract the disease. In this article, the authors discuss, with support of a case study, the importance of basic nursing intervention in this clinical environment, especially when monitoring stool output to determine the stage of illness of an EVD patient.
Colorectal cancer: care coordination in a tertiary referral centre in Saudi Arabia
Authors: Rafferty Louise , Tohmaz Khulood Rafic , Hibbert Denise
Published: July 2015

Colorectal cancer in Saudi Arabia is on the increase. From diagnosis through to completion of treatment and ongoing follow-up and screening, patients are required to undertake a long journey, involving visits to numerous specialists, and a variety of investigations, interventions and treatments. Unsurprisingly, patients feel lost, overwhelmed and anxious. There is an obvious need for ongoing communication, education, guidance, advocacy and help with navigation between services. Internationally, the need for expert cancer care coordination has been recognised for many years. Patients deserve standardisation of evidence-based care to help with the decision-making process. Cancer-care coordinators around the world have demonstrated improvements in patient flow, patient experience and satisfaction. The King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre in Riyadh is a tertiary care facility, treating approximately 30% of all cancer cases in Saudi Arabia. This article aims to describe the experience of introducing colorectal cancer care coordination, using a patient-centred, multidisciplinary approach.
Troubling the boundaries: Overcoming methodological challenges in a multi-sectoral and multi-jurisdictional HIV/HCV policy scoping review
Authors: Hare Kathleen A , Dubé Anik , Marshall Zack , Gahagan Jacqueline , Harris Gregory E , Tucker Maryanne , Dykeman Margaret , MacDonald Jo-Ann
Published: July 2015

Policy scoping reviews are an effective method for generating evidence-informed policies. However, when applying guiding methodological frameworks to complex policy evidence, numerous, unexpected challenges can emerge. This paper details five challenges experienced and addressed by a policy trainee-led, multi-disciplinary research team, while conducting a scoping review of youth Human Immunodeficiency Virus and Hepatitis C primary and secondary prevention policies, which occurred across and within sectors and jurisdictions in Atlantic Canada. How these challenges were addressed is described, as are suggestions for how the lessons learned may provide guidance to other policy scoping reviews. Implications for future directions are also discussed.
“I’d like to but I can’t”: the implementation of the Italian Act on parental leave
Authors: Mazzucchelli Sara , Rossi Giovanna
Published: July 2015

The male breadwinner family model has long been the hegemonic cultural model in Italy. This has defined family members’ relationship with the employment system; the environment considered suitable for bringing up children; and the division of work within the family, with data on the allocation of time showing the persistence of a gendered, unbalanced distribution of work. Within this context, an attempt has been made to respond to the problem of reconciling work and family care. The main relevant policy is Act 53/2000, introduced in 2000. In this article, we outline the essential features of this law, analyse its implementation and identify its strengths and weaknesses. The Italian case raises wider questions about the design of parental leave policies, their impact on parenting practices and the gendering of care. Despite being rather advanced in comparison with other European parental leave schemes, the Italian Act actually fosters a ‘short-leave male breadwinner’ model, where the involvement of fathers in care is still very limited. It also confirms the centrality of women to domestic and care work, as well as their limited presence in the labour market, compared with other European Union countries.
“Sound of Kuduro knocking at my door”: Kuduro Dance and the Poetics of Debility
Authors: Young Hershini
Published: July 2015

The music and dance style of the electronic based Kuduro has dominated dance floors all over the world since the release of French DJ Frédéric Galliano’s Kuduro Sound System (2005/2008), which featured Angolan artists such as Dog Murras. Kuduro’s upbeat tempo results in frenetic dancing that usually consists of hip hop-inspired moves, traditional Angolan and carnival dance steps, and dramatized everyday movements such as dancing on knees as if lower legs were amputated, or mimicking media images of “starving Africans.” This article traces the relationship between Kuduro dance and racialized disability. Looking specifically at the Kuduro variant of melindro , this article shows how the inclusion of large numbers of Angolan amputees who were victims of foreign and civil wars has created a black urban dance vocabulary via differential embodiment. Not only does Kuduro incorporate disability as part of its movement repertoire but it also includes differently abled bodies without insisting that they move as if able-bodied.
The Science of Freedom: Counterarchives of Racial Science on the Antebellum Stage
Authors: Rusert Britt
Published: July 2015

The history of American racial science shares an important genealogy with the history of performance. Throughout the antebellum period, the popular stage routinely doubled as a scientific laboratory, where theories of race were produced and disseminated to a mass audience. Operating in the same cultural milieu and in many cases, on the same performance circuits as race scientists, quack doctors, and scientific showmen with questionable credentials, black performers, musicians and lecturers regularly forged creative responses to the popular performance of race science. Following the bold leaps and experimental engagements with history that characterize the field of performance studies, this essay stitches together a counterarchive of racial science on the antebellum stage from what is a necessarily partial and elusive history. Following a paper trail of ticket stubs, newspaper announcements, broadsides, and other ephemera, I chronicle how a number of antislavery agents, including Henry “Box” Brown, Sarah Mapps Douglass, William Wells Brown, and a set of lesser-known figures, countered the widespread circulation of racist science in popular entertainment and print culture through dynamic performances of “fugitive science” in both the U. S. and Britain. Far from rejecting science as a whole, these figures sought to link “scientific revolution” to race revolution by incorporating phrenology, mesmerism, ethnology and other fields into their acts and lectures. The dynamic, restive movements of early black performance simultaneously refused race science’s attempt to “fix” nonwhite bodies within racist evolutionary taxonomies. Drawing on recent scholarship, the essay goes on to consider how the concept of fugitivity unsettles the history of empiricism, and turns our view to a broad field of experimentation traversing African American science, art, and expressivity while suggesting new transdisciplinary approaches to the study of black performance, the Black Atlantic, and the history of racial science.
“Spectacular Opacities”: The Hyers Sisters’ Performances of Respectability and Resistance
Authors: Buckner Jocelyn L.
Published: July 2015

This essay analyzes the Hyers Sisters, a Reconstruction-era African American sister act, and their radical efforts to transcend social limits of gender, class, and race in their early concert careers and three major productions, Out of Bondage and Peculiar Sam, or The Underground Railroad , two slavery-to-freedom epics, and Urlina, the African Princess , the first known African American play set in Africa. At a time when serious, realistic roles and romantic plotlines featuring black actors were nearly nonexistent due to the country’s appetite for stereotypical caricatures, the Hyers Sisters used gender passing to perform opposite one another as heterosexual lovers in their early operatic concerts and Urlina . Because they were sisters, audiences did not perceive any threat of an actual intimate exchange. As a result, they were able to create respectful depictions of romantic relationships onstage between black men and women that were otherwise impossible. Collaborating with other black theatre artists, including Sam Lucas and Pauline Hopkins, they created productions that presented inspiring depictions of black male heroes, intact black families, and blacks achieving social progress after securing their freedom. The Hyers Sisters’ positive (re)presentations of (African) American life and love were strategic, political acts of resistance against the rampant racism of Reconstruction-era America. Their pioneering productions enabled the sisters to create early opportunities for themselves and other black artists in a white, male dominated industry, and helped lay the groundwork for the growth and development of black theatre and popular entertainment in the decades to come.
Utopian Movements: Nikki Giovanni and the Convocation Following the Virginia Tech Massacre
Authors: Bernstein Robin
Published: July 2015

A seemingly impossible, utopian moment occurred on April 16, 2007 at the convocation following the mass shooting at Virginia Tech, in which student Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 students and faculty members. Nikki Giovanni, a luminary of the Black Arts Movement and a professor at Virginia Tech, read her stirring poem, “We Are Virginia Tech,” to the capacity audience in Cassell Coliseum. At the poem’s conclusion, the full house rose cheering and chanted, “Let’s Go, Hokies.” In this context, the familiar sports chant “took on new meaning,” as one local newspaper noted. The chant became a poem. And the audience members became poets, performing in alliance with a black feminist poet. This essay argues that this transformation became possible despite Giovanni’s racially marked and gender-queer performance because of Giovanni’s poetic invocation of unity in the context of the physical space of the sports arena. Giovanni’s poem invented a “we” that drew upon what Marvin Carlson would call the “haunted” aspects of the sports arena. Unlike the “we” constituted through past performances of athletic events, however, Giovanni’s “we” had no “they.” This subtle but crucial twist enabled Giovanni’s performance to harness the power of the athletic “we” (a “we” that is, like collegiate sports, always racially saturated) while steering it definitively away from the insularity, racism, and xenophobia that so palpably threatened to overwhelm a campus that had just sustained a mass shooting by a man of color. Most significantly of all, the setting of the sports arena invited the restoration of gestures—standing, chanting, clapping—by which the audience performed utopia. Nikki Giovanni’s performance, and the audience’s physical response, ultimately enables a new understanding of utopian performance—one based not on audiences feeling, but on audiences moving.
Aria for Ethiopia: The Operatic Aesthetic of Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood
Authors: Aljoe Nicole N.
Published: July 2015

Pauline Hopkins’s serialized magazine novel, Of One Blood; or, the Hidden Self (1902-03), is strongly connected to music. As Lois Brown has explained in her recent literary biography, Pauline Hopkins spent over fifteen years as a performer of classical music and musical theater before she turned to writing. And yet, scholars have not explored the impact of music on Hopkins’s literary œuvre. This paper will illuminate the significant impact of music within Of One Blood with a particular focus on “high-class” music—what late nineteenth-century African Americans referred to as classical music and operatic performances. In particular, Hopkins’s novel seems to revise Giuseppe Verdi’s 1871 opera, Aïda —another creative text inspired by archeological antiquities and the new discipline of Egyptology. In addition to signifying on Verdi’s misrepresentations of Nubia and Ethiopia in his opera, the novel also calls attention to the late nineteenth-century popularity of opera and African American female opera singers. While scholars acknowledge the foundational role played by spirituals, jubilee songs, and minstrel music—styles of music frequently associated with notions of “blackness”—this article will reveal the ways in which African American writers like Hopkins, Du Bois, and Johnson also drew upon classical music and performances—styles of music often associated with “whiteness”—in creating their works. Consequently, this article aims to illuminate the significant role played by classical music and operatic performances within early African American aesthetic traditions.
Assessing Characters of Blood ; or, What Is Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination?: Introduction
Authors: Trodd Zoe
Published: July 2015

The new book Characters of Blood: Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination by Celeste-Marie Bernier charts is the first full mapping of a black heroic tradition and asks us to reconsider the memory of six individuals in particular: Toussaint L’Ouverture, Nathaniel Turner, Sengbe Pieh, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman. This roundtable features five responses to the book. Robert Levine, Patricia Hills, Alan Rice, Eddie Chambers and Richard Newman use it as a jumping-off point to debate heroism, diasporic memory, the black Atlantic, and the relationship between art and activism. Responding to these commentaries, Bernier expands upon some of her book’s themes.
The Revenge of Emmett Till: Impudent Aesthetics and the Swagger Narratives of Hip-Hop Culture
Authors: Peterson James Braxton
Published: July 2015

The “revenge” of Emmett Till is figured here as the impudent tones and boastful themes in the recorded lyrics of a range of hip-hop artists. Some of these artists make specific allusions to the historical narrative of Till and one aim of this article is to situate those hip-hop allusions within the context of a literary history engaged in responses to the tragic murder of Emmett Till in 1955. Taken in their appropriate literary context ( i.e . the writings of John Edgar Wideman, Nikki Giovanni, Eldridge Cleaver, and others), these allusive lyrics within hip-hop culture reflect the complex interactive artistic connections between the civil rights era and the hip-hop generation.
There’s No Place Like Home(wood): The Transmutation of Place in the Literary Imagination of Wideman, French, and Wilson
Authors: Kaffer Michael
Published: July 2015

This article is a study of the way in which three African American writers from Pittsburgh transmute a physical place—Homewood or Hill Street areas of Pittsburgh—from a simple physical location to something different. For each of the three writers covered in this article—Wideman, French, and Wilson—the manner in which they take a physical location and make it something beyond a specific geographic fact will be examined. Tim Cresswell has written “place is not just a physical thing in the world but a way of understanding the world. … [P]lace is also a way of seeing, knowing, and understanding the world.” This is the perspective of this study: How do these three author take us beyond mere geography and move us to an understanding of the way the various characters understand the world. Wideman states in his preface to The Homewood Books that he is not interested so much in the physical location but rather “a culture, a way of seeing and being seen.” The three authors approach this topic from different perspectives and have different scopes, but the object remains constant throughout.
What Characters of Blood Can Offer Art Historians
Authors: Hills Patricia
Published: July 2015

The new book Characters of Blood: Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination by Celeste-Marie Bernier charts is the first full mapping of a black heroic tradition and asks us to reconsider the memory of six individuals in particular: Toussaint L’Ouverture, Nathaniel Turner, Sengbe Pieh, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman. This roundtable features five responses to the book. Robert Levine, Patricia Hills, Alan Rice, Eddie Chambers and Richard Newman use it as a jumping-off point to debate heroism, diasporic memory, the black Atlantic, and the relationship between art and activism. Responding to these commentaries, Bernier expands upon some of her book’s themes.
Doing the Slave Trade in Different Voices: Poetics and Politics in Robert Hayden’s First “Middle Passage”
Authors: Plasa Carl
Published: July 2015

Although an African American poem about the transatlantic slave trade, Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage” (1945; rev. 1962) paradoxically draws on an array of white writings to shape its vision, using compositional strategies indebted to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). The adoption of such an intertextual and interracial poetics is daringly provocative when considered in terms of the poem’s shifting literaryI, cultural and political contexts. As well as implicitly casting the younger author as Eliot’s equal, it locates his poem in dramatic tension with the segregationist structures of 1940s’ America and the purist dicta of the 1960s’ Black Aesthetic.
Hidden Heroes of the Black Atlantic
Authors: Rice Alan
Published: July 2015

The new book Characters of Blood: Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination by Celeste-Marie Bernier charts is the first full mapping of a black heroic tradition and asks us to reconsider the memory of six individuals in particular: Toussaint L’Ouverture, Nathaniel Turner, Sengbe Pieh, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman. This roundtable features five responses to the book. Robert Levine, Patricia Hills, Alan Rice, Eddie Chambers and Richard Newman use it as a jumping-off point to debate heroism, diasporic memory, the black Atlantic, and the relationship between art and activism. Responding to these commentaries, Bernier expands upon some of her book’s themes.
The Roots of “Wilding”: Black Literary Naturalism, the Language of Wilderness, and Hip Hop in the Central Park Jogger Rape
Authors: Mexal Stephen J.
Published: July 2015

This article traces a genealogy of the use of the term “wilding” in the 1989 Central Park Jogger rape. It analyzes the modern social construction of racial savagery, the liberal progressivism of domesticated “nature” in Frederick Olmsted’s design of Central Park, and the performance of primitivism and wilderness in both hip-hop culture and the literary naturalism of Charles Chesnutt and Richard Wright. It theorizes that the wrongful convictions of the five boys originally found guilty of the rape may have been spurred on in part by the misinterpretation of the word “wilding,” thus offering not only a significant etymological corrective to the history of “wilding,” but also a means of locating that history in a broader black literary tradition of reappropriation and subversion.
Contemporary Sorrow Songs: Traces of Mourning, Lament, and Vulnerability in Hip Hop
Authors: Winters Joseph
Published: July 2015

In this article, I use Du Bois’s reading of the sorrow songs and adopt the trope of sorrow to trace themes of loss, suffering, and hope within hip-hop music and culture. I argue that we can find two prominent forms of mourning within hip hop—one in response to race-inflected violence and injustice and another in response to the so called death of authentic hip hop. In the concluding part of this essay, I suggest ways to transform nostalgia for the golden age into a relationship to the past that is creative and generative.
Melle Mel in the Megaplex: Postmodern Performance and the Hip-Hop “Real” in Krush Groove & Beat Street
Authors: Hayman Casey
Published: July 2015

While Michael Schultz’s Krush Groove (1985) and Stan Lathan’s Beat Street (1984) represent two of Hollywood’s earliest engagements with hip-hop music and culture, little critical attention has been paid to these films. Instead, cultural critics from within and outside the hip-hop community tend to focus on films such as the publicly-funded, documentary-styled Wild Style (1983) and Style Wars (1983) as more “authentic” representations of early hip-hop culture. This essay argues that the dearth of critical analysis of these films evinces a binary paradigm implicit in much academic and mainstream discussion of hip-hop music and culture, in which hip hop must always either be resistant to or complicit with its absorption into the capitalist cultural marketplace, either “authentic” or a “sellout,” either “fake” or “real.” An employment of Jean Baudrillard’s notions of the proliferation of simulacra and the implosion of binary paradigms of meaning in postmodern society points up the ways that hip hop has, since its inception, called the very existence of such dichotomies into question. The essay argues that such seeming contradictions have always been inherent in hip-hop culture itself, and that hip-hop artists’ playful negotiations of these very tensions have afforded the genre its immense staying power in a postmodern society characterized by the implosion of binaries separating culture and commerce, work and play, reality and simulation. Analyses of these early “Hollywoodized” hip-hop films and the responses they spurred, then, have much to reveal about hip-hop music and culture’s entry into the mainstream commercial marketplace, and about hip hop’s continuing, fraught negotiations around the notions of authenticity and “keeping it real.”
The Survivor’s Odyssey: K’naan’s The Dusty Foot Philosopher as a Modern Epic
Authors: Sobral Ana
Published: July 2015

The essay proposes a literary approach to rap albums as a whole, regarding them as complex narratives that begin with the cover art and end with the last chords/beats of the final song. As a case study, the debut album of Somali-Canadian rapper K’naan, The Dusty Foot Philosopher (2005), is analyzed as a modern-day epic poem. K’naan in fact resorts to many of the classic epic tropes such as the sea voyage, the exile, the battle with adversaries, the mystical qualities of the heroic figure, etc.—and adapts them to the conventions of hip-hop culture. Just as the epic poem embodies the core values of the society from which it originates, so it can be argued that The Dusty Foot Philosopher functions as a paradigm of the experiences and challenges of the refugee, one of globalization’s defining figures.
Intra- and Interlingual Translation in Blackamerican Muslim Hip Hop
Authors: Grewal Sara Hakeem
Published: July 2015

This article examines three main aspects of translation in the hip hop of Blackamerican Muslim hip-hop artists Mos Def and Lupe Fiasco: first, translation between Hip Hop Nation Language (HHNL) and a high register of White Mainstream English (WME) termed “academic English”; second, translation between HHNL and WME more broadly; and third, translation between HHNL and Arabic. These artists’ approach to translation provides an alternative to the hegemonically normative ideas of language and translation that traditionally operate within a Christian frame, thereby also demonstrating the relevance of Sunni Islam to the broader Blackamerican community’s ability to resist the pressures of the white mainstream.
On the Real: Agency, Abuse, and Sexualized Violence in Rihanna’s “Russian Roulette”
Authors: Jones Esther
Published: July 2015

Rihanna’s “Russian Roulette,” her first single released after the domestic-violence incident involving her then-boyfriend Chris Brown, offers a key instructive moment that intersects the critical matrix of how we define and understand hip hop, gendered contributions to and experiences of the genre, and female hip-hop artists’ negotiation of complex issues of gender, sex, and violence. I argue that if we understand hip hop in its various, broadly imagined iterations, we can read Rihanna as a female hip-hop artist enmeshed in hip hop’s narrative production of “realness” through the discourses of sex and violence. The reality of a presumably private domestic-abuse scenario disrupts the constructed nature of the “keeping-it-real” posture upon which hip-hop discourse depends for its “cult of authenticity.” Arguing against theoretical positions that cast cultural performance as merely figurative, performative, or tropological, I suggest that Rihanna’s domestic-abuse scenario and subsequent “choice” to craft an eroticized response to it in the cover art for “Russian Roulette” constitute an elision of the public/private and real/performative discursive binaries. Such binaries converge to problematize notions of choice and consent for women who might otherwise be (reductively) read as complicit in their own gendered and sexual subjugation.
Programmed Space, Themed Space, and the Ethics of Home in Toni Morrison’s Paradise
Authors: Evans Shari
Published: July 2015

Toni Morrison’s Paradise evaluates the dangerous and compelling impulse to create utopia, which codifies practice of the ideal. Paradise exposes the ideological and practical planning involved in the creation and practice of utopic space and its ritualistic reiteration. This essay examines Paradise as Morrison’s argument that a true ethics of home emphasizes open-ended interpretation and individual agency in resisting and revising programmed space. Morrison’s ethics of home requires active, conscious, and responsible engagement in envisioning and maintaining a communal space of exchange.
The Ghosts of Economics Past: John Henry Days and the Production of History
Authors: Collins Peter
Published: July 2015

Ghosts have long been residents of the postmodern. Halfway between the material and the immaterial, a ghost is present but invisible, unchanging but indefinable, both permanent and ephemeral. Often the product of violence, its presence attests to the reality of violence and death, though it is itself incapable of dying. Ghosts stand in as the literal presence of the past in the present—a testament to the reality of bygone eras. This article analyzes the role of haunting in Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days , viewing ghosts as eruptions of a traumatic economic history into the present.
“Where a Man is a Man”?: Ancestral Possibilities in Charles Chesnutt’s Paul Marchand, F.M.C.
Authors: Marren Susan M.
Published: July 2015

This essay reads Charles Chesnutt’s Paul Marchand, F.M.C. not as a historical romance (as Chesnutt’s contemporaneous publishers deemed it) but rather as a peculiarly modernist passing novel. It argues that the novel’s hybrid possibilities stage a confrontation between an eighteenth-century standard of impartial “right reason” and the racially pluralistic world of nineteenth-century New Orleans.