bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Once More, with Feeling: Reflections on Racial Formation
Authors: Omi Michael , Winant Howard
Published: October 2008

Our concept of racial formation was advanced in 1986 as a critique of prevailing notions of race in the social sciences. We challenged approaches that treated race as epiphenomenal to supposedly more fundamental axes of stratification and difference: ethnicity, class, and nation. But we were disappointed—depressed, in fact—by the reception our analysis received. Some years would pass before our approach was seriously taken up by sociologists, political scientists, and other social science scholars. What kept our spirits buoyed during this period was the surprising discovery that our work was resonating with scholars in other disciplines, most notably in history, law, and literary studies. We learned much and greatly profited from these newfound colleagues' engagement with our work, from the ways they creatively extended our concept of racial formation, and from their advancement of new ways to think about the ongoing evolution of racism and its multiple dimensions.
Eliminating Diasporic Identities
Authors: Mersal Iman
Published: October 2008

In The unbearable lightness of being, Milan Kundera, a writer in diaspora, puts Sabina, a painter in diaspora, in the position of the artist facing the imposition of a ready-made identity. Kundera writes:

Sabina had once had an exhibit that was organized by a political organization in Germany. When she picked up the catalogue, the first thing she saw was a picture of herself with a drawing of barbed wire superimposed on it. Inside she found a biography that read like the life of a saint or martyr: she had suffered, struggled against injustice, been forced to abandon her bleeding homeland, yet was carrying on the struggle. “Her paintings are a struggle for happiness” was the final sentence.

She protested, but they did not understand her.

Do you mean that modern art isn't persecuted under Communism?

“My enemy is kitsch, not Communism!” she replied, infuriated.

(254)
Writing Islam in Contemporary American Poetry: On Mohja Kahf, Daniel Moore, and Agha Shahid Ali
Authors: Mattawa Khaled
Published: October 2008

Who would want to read an essay titled “Writing Christianity”? “Writing Judaism” might by now sound a bit dated, given that Jewish subject matter is the domain of some of this country's greatest novelists and poets. “Writing Buddhism” still has an appealing ring to it. “Writing Islam” as a topic would not sound interesting to most Muslim authors in Muslim societies. In fact, “Writing Islam” could sound like a fundamentalist ploy to corrupt the thoroughly secular world of literature in contemporary Muslim societies. A more appealing angle might be to focus on writing Islam in the West, or on the global stage, where a growing body of Muslim literature written in European languages is emerging. The authors of this body of literature are outside two folds: Western literature per se and the literatures of their Muslim societies of origin. How do Muslim authors, specifically poets, fashion a voice when they are writing mostly to outsiders? What subject matter will they treat and in what manner? This essay explores these questions by examining how writing Islam is exercised differently by three American Muslim poets, Mohja Kahf, Daniel Moore, and the late Agha Shahid Ali.
Remaking/Unmaking: Abu Ghraib and Poetry
Authors: Metres Philip
Published: October 2008

So now the pictures will continue to “assault” us—as many Americans are bound to feel. Will people get used to them? Some Americans are already saying that they have seen “enough.”

—Susan Sontag, “Regarding the Torture of Others”

… a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.

—Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain

When The ABU Ghraib Prison torture scandal began to circulate throughout The MASS media in Spring 2004, most pundits and commentators neglected to note how those images hauntingly paralleled the 9/11 attacks, insofar as each event's widespread publicity—replayed and reposted images of physical and psychological destruction—participated in the very unmaking that the perpetrators intended. In other words, just as the terrorist act on the Twin Towers was an act of both material and symbolic destruction that required media representation of the planes hitting the towers, mass media's recirculation of visual images of naked and dominated Iraqi men completed the act that Charles Graner and other United States military police had begun. Though the disturbing video representation of the 9/11 attacks rapidly disappeared from television, the Abu Ghraib photos persisted far longer (see York). The rapid disappearance of video of the planes striking the buildings suggests its traumatic power for Americans. But why would the Abu Ghraib photos be less disturbing than those of the attacks of September 11, 2001—given what they say about United States conduct in the war? In this essay, I consider the Abu Ghraib effect in the wider context of imperial imaging of the other. Second, I analyze artistic and literary responses (including Fernando Botero's Abu Ghraib paintings, Daniel Heyman's etchings, and an anthology of poems on torture) that attempt to re-present Abu Ghraib and make visible the invisible of that torture. Third, I sketch out how Arab American poets have played (and can continue to play) a critical role in the conversation about the effects of United States policies in the Middle East. Finally, I share my own poetic project, a long poem called “–u –r—” that attempts to make audible the muted voices of the tortured Iraqis at Abu Ghraib.
Transparent Eye, Voice Howling Within: Codes of Violence in Lawrence Joseph's Poetry
Authors: Rashid Frank D.
Published: October 2008

In the early quatrains of “Rubaiyat,” a poem in Lawrence Joseph's fourth book, into it, The poet adopts a curious perspective for an American poet of Arab ancestry who is intensely critical of American military aggression. Taking on the “eye” of the aggressor, he pulls up the “satellite image of a major / military target, a 3-D journey / into a landscape of hills and valleys.” He follows the lens as it zooms closer to the ground:

Zoom in close enough—the shadows

of statues, the swimming pools of palaces …

closer—a garden of palm trees,

oranges and lemons, chickens, sheep. … (41)
Unstated: Narrating War in Lebanon
Authors: Hassan Salah D.
Published: October 2008

This essay consists of three beginnings, then a deferred reading of a novel. One beginning, a theoretical beginning, reflects on the question implicit in my title: What is unstated in the state of Lebanon? Another beginning, a literary critical beginning, returns to the work of Kahlil Gibran, the most famous early-twentieth-century Arab North American writer. Gibran links modernist and postmodernist Arab North American writing and, in a historical parallel, connects the foundations of the Lebanese state under French colonial rule to its disintegration in the context of the civil war. A third beginning, a contextual beginning, evokes more recent events in Lebanon through a discussion of the July War of 2006, during which Israel bombed the country for over a month. These three points of departure, I suggest, are crucial to readings of contemporary Arab North American fiction, which is always conditioned by theories of the state, a post-Gibran literary sensibility, and the politics of the present. More specifically, I argue that Rawi Hage's representation of the civil war in Lebanon in DeNiro's Game negotiates the destruction of the Lebanese state through figures of the unstated, whose very existence questions more generally the state form as the preeminent site of political authority and contributes to unstating the state.
Racism Revisited: Sources, Relevance, and Aporias of a Modern Concept
Authors: Balibar Étienne
Published: October 2008

Why do we call certain attitudes, both individual and collective, racist? Why do we list certain discourses—admittedly a very wide range of discourses, which single out, stigmatize, threaten, or discriminate against various human and social groups—as racist? Why do we consider that practices, both spontaneous and institutional, unofficial and officially organized, that in the past and present have resulted in lasting forms of oppression, persistent hostilities and misunderstanding, and sometimes tragic violence in all sorts of societies are racist? To my surprise, this basic and preliminary question is seldom addressed in the huge scholarly and popular literature concerning racism—the old and new forms of racism, the modernity or antiquity of racism, the quantitative and qualitative variations of racism, and so on. Or, better said, the question is addressed only partially and indirectly: the category itself is taken for granted, all the more because the study of racism has become an essential sociological and political object, and what are mainly discussed are different definitions and theories and the conditions of their application. It seems that the very fact that there exists (and has long existed) something called racism, which includes a variety of manifestations, is subject to transformations, and does not purely and simply coincide with violence, not even violence based on collective hatred, need not be questioned. But isn't it necessary to discuss the reasons that we consider this fact obvious?
Race in Africa: Four Epigraphs and a Commentary
Authors: Garuba Harry
Published: October 2008

“Look, a Negro!” It was an external stimulus that flicked over me as I passed by. I made a tight smile.

“Look, a Negro!” It was true. It amused me.

“Look, a Negro!” The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of my amusement.

“Mama, see the Negro! I am frightened!” Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible.

—Frantz Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness” (111–12)

The racialization of the Tutsi/Hutu was not simply an intellectual construct, one which later and more enlightened generations of intellectuals could deconstruct and discard at will. More to the point, racialization was also an institutional construct. Racial ideology was embedded in institutions, which in turn undergirded privilege and reproduced racial ideology. It was this political-institutional fact that intellectuals alone would not be able to alter. Rather, it would take a political-social movement to be dismantled.

—Mahmood Mamdani,When Victims Become Killers(87)

Far back as one may go into the past, from the northern Sudanese to the southern Bantu, the African has always and everywhere presented a concept of the world which is diametrically opposed to the traditional philosophy of Europe.

—Leopold Sedar Senghor, “Negritude: A Humanism of the Twentieth Century” (30)

Sango's history is not the history of primal becoming but of racial origin, which is historically dated.

—Wole Soyinka,Myth, Literature and the African World(9)

These four epigraphs give a sense of the diversity of usages of the category of race in Africa and the discourses and practices that coalesce around these usages. I use the textual fragments to open up questions about race in Africa, to explore the various discursive economies in which race is articulated and circulates, and the registers and vocabularies in which responses to it have been conducted. The approach adopted is therefore metonymic: each fragment represents a larger body of texts and practices that broadly constitute a discourse defined by a set of shared characteristics. My purpose is not to discuss exhaustively these characteristics but rather to draw rough distinctions among the conditions that govern their articulation and circulation. In this way I can indicate the network of social, historical, and discursive relations in which the idea of race functions.
Gone Astray in the Flesh: Kara Walker, Black Women Writers, and African American Postmemory
Authors: Keizer Arlene R.
Published: October 2008

In the vigorous debate over Kara Walker's art—in particular, her life-size, black-on-white depictions of psychosexual fantasies seeded by American slavery—much attention has been paid to the objections raised by African American artists belonging to a generation older than Walker's. These older artists, including Betye Saar, Faith Ringgold, and Howardena Pindell, as well as commentators like Juliette Bowles, are often highlighted as Walker's main detractors, rendering the attack on her work a form of internecine, intergenerational warfare in African American intellectual and cultural life. This articulation of the debate obscures the extent to which themes and figures in Walker's oeuvre link it to the work of numerous African American women whose writing began to appear in the early 1970s. Walker is connected to literary counterparts like Gayl Jones, Carolivia Herron, Alice Randall, and Octavia Butler through her construction of characters marked by their sexual involvement with the master class. How these characters manage a set of exploitative relationships—in other words, how they explore their sexualities in the context of coercion—establishes them as a literary and visual sisterhood. Because Walker's silhouettes and other creations have been exhibited to large, integrated audiences in some of the most august international and domestic museums, they have provoked more comment and wider protests than the novels of contemporary African American women writers, but the differences in cultural reception mask the deep similarity between these bodies of work.
Cyberrace
Authors: Nakamura Lisa
Published: October 2008

Remembercyber?surely one of the most irritating and ubiquitous prefixes of the nineties,cyberquickly became attached to all kinds of products (the Sony Cybershot camera), labor styles (cybercommuting), and communicative practices (cyberspace) that have now become so normalized as already digital that the prefix has dropped out of the language. Photography, work, and social discourse no longer need be flagged as cyber since we can more or less assume that in postindustrial, informationalized societies they usually are.Cybermigrated widely during the nineties, but the legal scholar Jerry Kang's article “Cyber-race,” which appeared in theHarvard Law Reviewin 2000, was the first to attach this prefix to race. Kang answers the question “can cyberspace change the very way that race structures our daily lives?” with an affirmative: “race and racism are already in cyberspace.” He then proposes three potential “design strategies” for lawmakers to deal with the problem of race and racism in cyberspace: the abolitionist approach, in which users take advantage of the Internet's anonymity as a means of preventing racism by hiding race; the integrationist approach, in which race is made visible in online social discourse; and the most radical one, the transmutation approach. Strategies for transmuting race in cyberspace reprise some of the discourse about identity and performativity that was often associated with Judith Butler—“it seeks racial pseudonymity, or cyber-passing, in order to disrupt the very notion of racial categories. By adopting multiple racialized identities in cyberspace, identities may slowly dissolve the one-to-one relationship between identity and the physical body” (1206).
Organizing Native American and Indigenous Studies
Authors: Warrior Robert
Published: October 2008

For me, entering this profession involved the broader context of native american and indigenous studies as well as native American literary studies. My scholarship, pedagogy, and professional connections have relied on a synergy between texts as Native authors have crafted them and the social, political, and experiential contexts from which those authors and their texts emerged. Though plenty of work in Native literary studies does not draw on the broader field of Native studies, my own approach has most often placed me firmly in the overlapping space between the two.
Images of Filipino Racialization in the Anthropological Laboratories of the American Empire: The Case of Daniel Folkmar
Authors: Campomanes Oscar V.
Published: October 2008

In his now classic essay of race discourse analysis, “race under representation,” David Lloyd observes that “the discourse of race … undergoes a crucial shift in the late eighteenth century from a system of arbitrary marks to the ascription of natural signs” (69). The consequent fetishistic obsession with phenotype and somatology holds hegemonic sway over discourses of racial difference from that moment up to the early 1900s and the 1920s, when anthropological relativism and the cultural pluralism of Horace Kallen and Robert Park (of the Chicago school) eclipse nineteenth-century biological racism, at least in the United States.
About Ghost Stories: The Vietnam War and “Rememoration”
Authors: Espiritu Yen Le
Published: October 2008

In her bookGhostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination, avery gordon writes that “to study social life one must confront theghostlyaspects of it”—the experiential realities of social and political life that have been systematically hidden or erased. To confront the ghostly aspects of social life is to tell ghost stories: to pay attention to what modern history has rendered ghostly and to write into being the seething presence of the things that appear to be not there (Gordon 7–8). By most accounts, Vietnam was the site of one of the most brutal and destructive of the wars between Western imperial powers and the people of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Yet public discussions and commemorations of the Vietnam War in the United States often skip over this devastating history, thereby ignoring the war's costs borne by the Vietnamese—the lifelong costs that turn the 1975 “fall of Saigon” and the exodus from Vietnam into “the endings that are not over” (Gordon 195). Without creating an opening for a Vietnamese perspective of the war, these public deliberations refuse to remember Vietnam as a historical site, Vietnamese people as genuine subjects, and the Vietnam War as having any kind of integrity of its own (Desser).
Making Up Race: Notes on Buraku Literature in Japan
Authors: Fowler Edward
Published: October 2008

Americans have grown up with the idea of race. Race, we are taught, is real because skin color, facial features, and other bodily attributes mark a person definitively as a member of a particular race. This claim is made despite the often astonishing physical differences among people said to belong to the same race or the necessarily arbitrary line drawn between races when the visibility test fails to produce any differences (thus allowing for the possibility of “passing”).
Jokes and Butts: Can We Imagine Humor in a Global Public Sphere?
Authors: Göktürk Deniz
Published: October 2008

In his essay titled “Drawing Blood” for Harper's magazine in June 2006, written as a response to the Muhammad cartoon affair, Art Spiegelman argued convincingly that a cartoon is, first and foremost, a cartoon. It sounds straightforward, but is it really? Following Spiegelman, we can define caricatures as charged or loaded images that compress ideas into memorable icons, namely clichés. A cartoon must have a point, and a good cartoon can change our perspective on the ruling order. Spiegelman opens his discussion with classical caricatures such as Honoré Daumier's 1831 depiction of King Louis-Philippe as Gargantua and George Grosz's 1926 attack on the “Pillars of Society” (“Stützen der Gesellschaft”) as beer-drinking, pamphlet-reading, swastika-wearing men without brains. Spiegelman acknowledges these cartoonists as “masters of insult,” who often had to face trial or imprisonment for their transgressions (45). The question is whether the twelve cartoons of Muhammad, published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten on 30 September 2005, are in any way compatible with the great tradition of caricature.
Juggling Race and Class in Brazil's Past
Authors: Graham Richard
Published: October 2008

There was never anything merely black or white about brazilian notions of race and the differences attributable to it. IT IS easy to see today that the poor tend to be darker than those in the middle and upper classes and that those of darker color are most often poor. Yet there are dark-skinned persons in positions of power and prestige, and many whites live cheek by jowl with nonwhites, especially but not only in poor neighborhoods. Despite regional variations, Brazil is characterized by the complex interweaving of racial and social categories, making it hard to separate color from class as the predominant marker of differentiation. Racial identity has always been a tangled business, and in the past the existence of a finely ranked but permeable social order meant that society could absorb individual mobility without becoming egalitarian.
Unsettling Racisms
Authors: Gunew Sneja
Published: October 2008

Over the last few decades, my work has been animated by the fundamental question, how can we make strange the universalist claims or assumptions of the epistemologies with which we work in order to reveal their cultural specificity? It is a question that also emerges in connection with modes of racialization. Thus, one should not simply compare types of racialization, as though they were commensurable, but ask what one can do to show the work these concepts perform in relation to specific histories and languages. My own familiar methods of articulating processes of racialization became thoroughly destabilized on a recent visit to India, where the functions of caste appeared to trump questions of racialization in critical discussions. But before entering this minefield of complexities and contradictions, let me summarize the previous work with which I've been associated.
ImpersoNation: Toward a Theory of Black-, Red-, and Yellowface in the Americas
Authors: Lane Jill
Published: October 2008

How shall we face the enormous evidence of impersonation as a central cultural practice in the development of national discourses in the Americas?

It is well known that, in December 1773, a ship namedDartmouthsat idle in Boston Harbor, prevented from unloading her cargo by the governor in protest of the import tax and prevented from leaving the harbor by customs rules. As the customs period came to a close, a group of newly patriotic Bostonians came up with a plan to resolve the crisis. One historian recounts, “a chorus of Indian war whoops sounded outside the hall and a party of what looked like Indian men ran to the wharf, entered the ships, and proceeded to dump the tea in Boston Harbor” (Deloria 2). And the rest, as they say, was history: the Boston Tea Party has since functioned as favored tale of origin for American independence and national identity.
The Afro-Asian Analogy
Authors: Lye Colleen
Published: October 2008

If the spate of recent publications on transnational Afro-Asian connections is any indication, we may have finally arrived at a welcome third stage of ethnic studies, one long postponed by a standoff between a multiracial model limited by a national horizon and a diasporic model that lacked a historical ground for conducting cross-racial analysis. The neo-Bandung allegiance of this Afro-Asianism—most prominent in the work of Vijay Prashad and Bill Mullen—explicitly aligns itself against the postnationalist ethos of hybridity theory and in favor of a toughened anti-imperial stance. There is much to admire about this critical turn; its increasing influence is surely a sign of our worsening times, reflected in the difference between the postsocialist euphoria of the 1990s—which projected the radicalization of democracy through the articulation of class with race, gender, and sexuality—and the return of empire and its banalization of democratic rhetoric after 9/11. Despite this Afro-Asianist project's more open recognition of the relevance of Asian embourgeoisement to its own desire for a renewed resistance politics, however, it is not yet clear whether the retrieval of Third Worldist genealogies accomplishes something more than a nostalgic response to the rise of Asian capitalism on a world scale and to the thinning claim of Asian American intellectuals to any representative function. And yet, to fulfill the originary promise of ethnic studies, which emerged out of the articulation between anti-imperialist and anti-racist struggle in the late 1960s, this is what it must and should do.
Racism As We Sense It Today
Authors: Mignolo Walter D.
Published: October 2008

The research that I reported in the darker side of the renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization (1995) was driven by my desire and need to understand the opening up of the Atlantic in the sixteenth century, its historical, theoretical, and political consequences. How was it that coexisting socioeconomic organizations like the Ottoman and Mughal sultanates as well as the incanate in the Andes and the tlahtoanate in the Valley of Mexico were either inferior or almost absent in the global historical picture of the time? I became aware, for example, that people in the Valley of Mexico living in the Aztec tlahtoanate, whether in conformity or dissenting, were compared—by the Spaniards—with the Jews. The comparison was twofold: on the one hand, the Indians and the Jews were dirty and untrustworthy people; on the other hand, the Indians in the New World may have been part of the Jewish diaspora. So, the comparison got in trouble, because Indians and Jews may have been the same people. The Jesuit priest José de Acosta, in his Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1589), asked whether the Indians descended from the Jews, addressing a question that was on everybody's mind. He dismissed the possibility of the connection, because the Jews had had a sophisticated writing system for a long time while the Indians were illiterate (in the Western sense of the word). Jews liked money, Acosta pointed out, while Indians were not even aware of it; and while Jews took circumcision seriously, Indians had no idea of it. Last but not least, if Indians were indeed of Jewish origin, they would not have forgotten the Messiah and their religion.
Black Op
Authors: Moten Fred
Published: October 2008

Black studies is a dehiscence at the heart of the institution and on its edge; Its broken, coded documents sanction walking in another world while passing through this one, graphically disordering the administered scarcity from which black studies flows as wealth. The cultivated nature of this situated volatility, this emergent poetics of the emergency in which the poor trouble the proper, is our open secret.
Racialization and the Colonial Architecture: Othering and the Order of Things
Authors: Nnaemeka Obioma
Published: October 2008

Steve Martinot argues that racism is the system and racialization “The process through which white society has constructed and co-opted differences in bodily characteristics and made them modes of hierarchical social categorizations” (180). Over half a century ago, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was so concerned about the genesis and consequence of the “process” that it issued a statement on race. Reeling from World War II, the global community saw the urgent need to put in place mechanisms for promoting global peace. The establishment of UNESCO in 1945 was aimed specifically at promoting a culture of peace. Convinced that racism and racial inequality were a root cause of the war, the authors of the UNESCO constitution (1945) condemned “the doctrine of the inequality of men and races” in the constitution's preamble. Responding to a resolution adopted by the United Nations Social and Economic Council at its sixth session in 1948, UNESCO gathered a group of experts (anthropologists and sociologists) from almost all continents (Africa was the exception) to develop for dissemination a statement on race that was based on scientific facts. The committee released a “Statement on Race” on 18 July 1950 which concludes that “there is no proof that the groups of mankind differ in their innate mental characteristics, whether in respect of intelligence or temperament [and] the scientific evidence indicates that the range of mental capacities in all ethnic groups is much the same” (9). The statement also asserted that the “biological fact of race and the myth of ‘race’ should be distinguished. For all practical and social purposes ‘race’ is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth” (8). The committee affirmed the universality of the “brotherhood of man” and suggested that race as a concept be replaced by “ethnic” (6). Criticism of the statement was swift and vehement. The controversy prompted UNESCO to empanel another committee to produce a second statement the following year. Over the years, other organizations, such as the American Sociological Association and the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, have issued their own statements on race.
Violence, Hmong American Visibility, and the Precariousness of Asian Race
Authors: Schein Louisa , Thoj Ya-Megn
Published: October 2008

When the murders at Virginia Tech in spring of 2007 began to be processed, by mainstream media and Asian American commentators alike, in tenuously racial terms as the un/intelligible acts of a Korean American student, Seung-hui Cho, some observers of media racialization recalled the spectacularizations of Chai Soua Vang, the Hmong hunter who killed six white hunters in the woods of Wisconsin in 2004. Were these events likely to be discursively linked, and if so what effect would they produce? Would they destabilize tropes of Asian American men as studious, reserved, effeminate model minorities? Would we see the rise, or the return, of a racial menace in the form of gun-toting, ruthless, killer Asian males, and what would be the fallout? What difference would it make to discursive homogenization that one of the killers was Hmong, a member of a group that has articulated awkwardly if at all with prevailing images of Asian Americans?
Dispatch from Hong Kong
Authors: Shen Shuang
Published: October 2008

I moved to Hong Kong about fourteen months ago to teach in a liberal arts university located in the new territories, on the border between Hong Kong and mainland China, about half an hour away by bus. Before coming to Hong Kong, I had taught for a few years in several American institutions, ranging from a community college to a research university. The courses I taught were mostly in Asian American literature, postcolonial literature, and Chinese literature in translation. Immersed as a graduate student and a teacher in American multiculturalism, postcolonialism, and ethnic studies, I have found a great deal of difference between the situation in Hong Kong and the social contexts of the United States and former colonial nations in South Asia, in which most ethnic, multicultural, and postcolonial theories are situated.
Transfer of Drug Resistance Genes into Hematopoietic Stem Cells for Marrow Protection
Authors: Bertino Joseph R.
Published: October 2008

The study investigates the use of gene transfer with genes that confer drug resistance for the purpose of bone marrow protection from chemotherapy.
Dr. Joseph R. Bertino: A Reflection
Authors: Chabner Bruce A.
Published: October 2008

This editorial honors Dr. Joseph R. Bertino on his award of the Pinedo Prize.
Incomplete surgical resection of ductal carcinomas in situ results in activation of ERBB2 in residual breast cancer cells
Authors: Singer Christian F , Hudelist Gernot , Fuchs Eva-Maria , Köstler Wolfgang , Fink-Retter Anneliese , Gschwantler-Kaulich Daphne , Gnant Michael , Lamm Wolfgang , Rudas Margarethe , Czerwenka Klaus , Kubista Ernst
Published: October 2008

ERBB2 amplification and consecutive overexpression is a predictor for poor prognosis in breast cancer patients. In addition, incomplete resection of ERBB2-overexpressing tumors leads to increased proliferation of residual breast cancer cells. While the local release of cytokines is thought to be responsible for the malignant behavior of remaining tumor tissue, the exact mechanism is still unknown. We have analyzed epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), activated (p)EGFR, and activated (p)ERBB2 protein expression in ERBB2-overexpressing and in non-ERBB2-overexpressing tumors from patients who underwent breast surgery and consecutive re-excision for involved margins, and compared expression levels by immunohistochemistry. While overall ERBB2 protein expression in the initial and the re-excised sample were comparable, we observed an increase in pERBB2 in ductal carcinomas in situ in both, ERBB2-overexpressing (16/21 vs 24/24; P=0.018, χ2 test) and non-ERBB2-overexpressing tumors (3/28 vs 5/12; P=0.025, χ2 test). pERBB2 was not increased in invasive tumors, regardless on whether the samples had been taken from a ERBB2-overexpressing (9/25 vs 6/17; P=0.261, χ2 test) or a non-ERBB2-overexpressing tumor (1/27 vs 0/8; P=0.581, χ2 test). EGFR expression was only detected in 1/47 ERBB2-overexpressing primary tumors and 2/48 non-ERBB2-overexpressing tumors, and was undetectable in re-excised specimen. Taken together, we have demonstrated an increase in ERBB2 receptor activation in incompletely resected preinvasive breast cancer. We hypothesize that receptor phosphorylation is caused by growth factor stimulation in response to intraoperative tissue damage, and perioperative inhibition of specific cytokines could become a promising therapeutic strategy.
Performance of two photovoltaic arrays in the UK
Authors: Tovey K. , Turner C.
Published: October 2008

There are numerous conflicting reports into the economic and embodied energy return of photovoltaic (PV) arrays installed in the UK. Using actual performance data measured on two PV arrays installed on the Zicer building at the University of East Anglia, this paper attempts to resolve some of the issues arising from earlier predictions made using theoretical test bed performance data. A PV model using the monitored data, in combination with solar radiation and geometry data from across the UK, was used to predict the average annual electricity output from the installations over a range of tilt angles, orientations and geographical locations. Six separate capital cost scenarios are considered and the predictions of the unit cost for electricity range from £0·10 (€0·14) per kWh under the most favourable conditions to £2·68 (€3·83) per kWh. At a mean solar radiation of 1000 kWh/ m2 per year, typical of many locations in the UK, the energy yield ratio (EYR) ranges from 4·3 to 5·1 depending on whether the cells are monocrystalline or polycrystalline and the assumptions made in the scenarios. Even on a vertical west-facing face, an EYR of over 2·5 is achieved.
Financing new low-carbon electricity generation in Britain
Authors: Palmer K.
Published: October 2008

This paper considers the challenges involved in financing new electricity generating capacity in Great Britain in the light of government-backed carbon reduction initiatives. Impacts of carbon costs on electricity prices, the economics of various types of generation and the implications of the renewables obligations are discussed. The paper considers whether new nuclear generating capacity will be economically viable in the UK and its cost effectiveness in terms of reducing carbon emissions relative to wind power.
Briefing: Offshore wind energy—a challenge for UK civil engineering
Authors: Tricklebank A. H.
Published: October 2008

This article aims to provide a brief review of the current position of UK offshore wind energy development, particularly for those who are interested, but not deeply immersed, in the current scene. It is written from the perspective of a civil and structural engineer who has been engaged for some years in the development of a new approach to offshore foundation construction and is concerned that there should be a more visible involvement of the profession in the future development of large-scale offshore and marine renewable energy systems.
Low-cost biomass electricity: more wires or more traffic?
Authors: Everett R. , Billington I.
Published: October 2008

Given the construction of a new wood-fired power station in Scotland and the recent refusal of planning permission for one in Devon, the impacts of such plants need consideration. This paper attempts to answer a simple question: ‘if least-cost options are to be pursued, will an expansion of UK electricity generation from energy crops require strengthening of the electricity grids or will it involve more physical transport of fuel?’. The economies of scale of biomass electricity generation plant and transport costs for biomass fuel are examined. This has been part of a wider ranging study of the effects of an increase in renewable electricity generation on the electricity grid, focusing on the far west of Cornwall. It concludes that the economies of scale in generation are important. The physical transport of fuel to large plants is likely to be cheaper than extending the grid to a large number of smaller ones. Over longer distances the relatively low costs of transport by train and coastal shipping may provide some options for the future.
WHITE SPRUCE MEETS BLACK SPRUCE: DISPERSAL, POSTFIRE ESTABLISHMENT, AND GROWTH IN A WARMING CLIMATE
Authors: Wirth C. , Lichstein J. W. , Dushoff J. , Chen A. , Chapin F. S.
Published: October 2008

Local distributions of black spruce (Picea mariana) and white spruce (Picea glauca) are largely determined by edaphic and topographic factors in the interior of Alaska, with black spruce dominant on moist permafrost sites and white spruce dominant on drier upland sites. Given the recent evidence for climate warming and permafrost degradation, the distribution of white spruce is expected to expand, but the transition from black to white spruce may be dispersal limited: unlike the semi‐serotinous black spruce, postfire regeneration of white spruce relies on seed dispersal from unburned areas. To determine the relative roles of dispersal, establishment, and growth in recruitment of white and black spruce, we studied postfire spruce regeneration in a 21‐year‐old burn across a white spruce–black spruce transition in the interior of Alaska. Although prefire spatial distributions of adults of the two species were well separated along the topographic sequence from upland to floodplain sites, the spatial distributions of recruits overlapped considerably. Even >700 m away from its seed source, white spruce sapling density on typical black spruce sites was high enough to form fully stocked stands. In contrast, black spruce regeneration was sparse on typical white spruce upland sites. Establishment rates of both species, estimated from a statistical model, were highest in mossy, wet depressions, which tended to have a thick residual postfire organic layer (∼10 cm). On all site types, height growth rates inferred from age–height relationships were comparable for recruits of both species. On typical black spruce sites ≥300 m into the burn, white spruce was younger (and, therefore, shorter) than black spruce due to the timing of masting events following the fire. There was no indication that dispersal, establishment, or edaphic constraints on juvenile growth limit white spruce's capacity to invade typical black spruce stands during the recruitment stage in our study area. It is unlikely that white spruce recruits would persist to the adult stage if the permafrost returned to the original prefire levels during future postfire succession. However, if permafrost continues to degrade under climate warming, transition to a white spruce‐dominated landscape could be rapid.
MULTIPLE REGIME SHIFTS IN A SUBTROPICAL PEATLAND: COMMUNITY‐SPECIFIC THRESHOLDS TO EUTROPHICATION
Authors: Hagerthey Scot E. , Newman Susan , Rutchey Ken , Smith Eric P. , Godin Jason
Published: October 2008

Ecosystems have a natural resilience to perturbations, where resilience is the magnitude of a disturbance that an ecosystem can resist before changes in structure, function, and services result in a regime shift. The Everglades region of Florida, USA, has been detrimentally impacted by phosphorus (P) enrichment and a regime shift from Cladium (sawgrass) to Typha (cattail) marsh has been described. We examine another facet of the low‐nutrient Everglades stability regime, open‐water sloughs, to determine if eutrophication leads to similar regime shifts.

We analyzed surface water P and soil P as controlling variables that, once a critical threshold is surpassed, alter ecosystem state variables. Nonlinear relationships between P and vegetation were observed along a northern Everglades eutrophication gradient. In addition to the Cladium–Typha regime shift, a second independent regime shift, slough–Typha, was identified. Synoptic surveys of 49 sloughs within the boundary between the slough and Typha regime revealed that surface water total phosphorus (TP) and the benthic algal floc layer (BAFL) were the controlling variables, with critical thresholds of 11 μg/L and 412 mg/kg, respectively. The slough regime below these thresholds was characterized by calcareous periphyton (BAFL TP = 298 mg P/kg; BAFL calcium = 149 g Ca/kg). Above the TP thresholds, vegetation composition shifted to open‐marsh species with significantly higher BAFL TP (700 mg P/kg) and total organic carbon (TOC) (350 g C/kg). A second BAFL TP threshold occurred at 712 mg P/kg, above which Nymphaea dominated and BAFL TP (1034 mg P/kg) and TOC (417 g C/kg) significantly increased. Nymphaea sloughs transitioned to the Typha regime. The boundary reflects the loss of ecosystem resilience due to eutrophication. Both low‐nutrient stability regimes (slough and Cladium) lie precariously close to the P critical threshold but differ in how eutrophication is absorbed and resisted. The slough regime transitions rapidly through a series of ecosystem state changes linked to positive feedback loops that affect P dynamics, whereas the Cladium regime does not. An adaptive management strategy has been implemented to address the surface water TP threshold; however, to ensure successful restoration of the Everglades, the BAFL and soil TP thresholds also need to be considered.
STAND AND LANDSCAPE‐LEVEL DISTURBANCE DYNAMICS IN OLD‐GROWTH FORESTS IN WESTERN MASSACHUSETTS
Authors: D'Amato Anthony W. , Orwig David A.
Published: October 2008

Natural disturbances strongly influence the dynamics and developmental patterns of forest ecosystems; however, relatively little is known about the historic patterns of natural disturbance for many portions of eastern North America, such as southern New England, where human disturbance has predominated for centuries. For these regions, much of our understanding of natural disturbance dynamics comes from studies of younger second‐growth forests or isolated old‐growth stands, thus limiting the temporal and spatial resolution of our knowledge of dynamics in these regions. To address these limitations, we analyzed dendroecological data from the 18 largest remaining old‐growth stands in western Massachusetts, ranging in proximity from 1–60 km apart, in an effort to characterize the historic stand and landscape‐level patterns of natural disturbance. Our results indicate that disturbance regimes for these systems were dominated by relatively frequent, low‐intensity disturbances (average 5.0% ± 0.2% canopy area disturbed per decade) operating somewhat randomly on the landscape. Across the study areas, most decadal disturbances (86.2%) involved <10% canopy loss. There was no evidence of stand‐replacing disturbances during the period examined (1700–1989), and the maximum canopy area disturbed in any given decade was 26.3%. Nonmetric multidimensional scaling demonstrated that several forests shared similar disturbance histories despite being separated by >50 km. Comparisons of these patterns with model simulations of past hurricane events and historical documents suggest that broadscale disturbances, such as hurricanes and ice storms, resulted in common disturbance peaks and subsequent recruitment peaks at spatially disparate areas in the 1790s, 1870s, 1900s, and 1920s. Conversely, the lack of synchrony in proximate areas during these events highlights the patchy nature of these disturbances on the landscape. Compositional and physiographic factors influenced disturbance patterns, as stands located on northwest‐facing slopes or containing significant Picea rubens components in the forest overstory experienced the highest levels of disturbance. Our results highlight the utility of incorporating dendroecological reconstructions across numerous old‐growth stands to interpret the historic stand and landscape‐level disturbance dynamics in areas devoid of large, contiguous old‐growth landscapes.
WHAT GROUNDS SOME BIRDS FOR LIFE? MOVEMENT AND DIVING IN THE SEXUALLY DIMORPHIC GALÁPAGOS CORMORANT
Authors: Wilson Rory P. , Vargas F. Hernán , Steinfurth Antje , Riordan Philip , Ropert-Coudert Yan , Macdonald David W.
Published: October 2008

Flightlessness in previously volant birds is taxonomically widespread and thought to occur when the costs of having a functional flight apparatus outweigh the benefits. Loss of the ability to fly relaxes body mass constraints which can be particularly advantageous in divers, because underwater performance correlates with mass. The Galápagos CormorantPhalacrocorax harrisiis flightless and the largest of its 27‐member genus. Here, the loss of flight, and consequent reduced foraging range, could be compensated by enhanced dive performance. Over three years, 46 Galápagos Cormorants were successfully equipped with time–depth–temperature recorders, and 30 birds with GPS recorders during the breeding season. Birds foraged at a mean of 690 m from the nest and just 230 m from the nearest coast, confirming an extremely limited foraging range during the breeding season and corresponding increased potential for intraspecific competition. Although the maximum recorded dive depth of 73 m tallied with the species body mass, >90% of dives were conducted in water <15 m deep. The heavier males foraged in different areas and dived longer and deeper than females, which exposed males to colder water. Consideration of how plumage insulation decreases with depth indicates that diving males should lose 30% more heat than females, although this may be partially compensated by their lower surface area : volume ratio. A simple model highlights how energy expenditure from swimming underwater due to buoyancy and energy lost as heat have opposing trends with increasing depth, leading to the prediction of an optimum foraging depth defined by the volume of plumage air and water temperature. This has ramifications for all diving seabirds. It is proposed that the reduction in wing size, together with energy‐expensive flight musculature, allows the Galápagos Cormorant to be more efficient at shallow depths than other seabirds, but only in warm equatorial waters. The high prey density and predictability of benthic prey in defined areas of the Galápagos can be particularly well exploited by this flightless species, with its limited foraging range, but the Galápagos Cormorant is unlikely to be able to accommodate much change in environmental conditions.