American Roots Research Articles

Cardiomyocyte contractile force changes in response to AGRWE detected by AFM

The cardiac contractile force is an important predictor of healthy and cardiovascular diseases. The changes of cardiomyocyte contractile force in response to American ginseng root water extract (AGRWE) detected by atomic force microscope have not been investigated yet. This study examined the effects of AGRWE on single beating cardiomyocytes extracted from a newborn rat. The same cardiomyocytes were incubated with AGRWE at a concentration of 50 μg/ml for about 30 min, and the cardiomyocytes' contractile force increased from 1.74 ± 1.01 to 3.49 ± 1.53 nN. The mean value of the contractile strain calculated was 3.32 ± 1.55% for the cardiomyocyte before the treatment with AGRWE, while for the cardiomyocyte treated with AGRWE it increased to 4.60 ± 1.35%. The results also showed that the beating rate of the same single beating cardiomyocytes was decreased from 34 ± 11 beats/min (control, n = 10) to 20 ± 9 beats/min. In conclusion, the experimental results have shown clearly that the contractile forces and strain of single beating cardiomyocytes treated with AGRWE are significantly higher than the control group, while the heart rate was decreased. It suggests that ginseng agents are promising candidates in improving cardiac functions for treating heart failure.

The American roots of the U.S. Constitution

The American roots of the U.S. Constitution

VernoniasubgenusAustrovernonia, a new subgenus from South America (Compositae, Vernonieae, Vernoniinae).

Vernoniaincana Less. and V.echioides Less. are two semi-aquatic species from southern South American that are referred to as “the semi-aquatic Vernonia of South America” and they have been, until now, retained as members of Vernonia mostly because each had some unusual characters that made them hard to place. Based on an ongoing molecular study, we can now say that V.incana is the sister taxon to all true Vernonia and can therefore be responsibly left in Vernonia but, because of its morphological and geographic differences, it is now assigned to its own subgenus: Vernonia subg. Austrovernonia. Vernoniaechioides is not closely related to V.incana and is now part of a separate investigation. This placement of V.incana as sister to the true Vernonia species brings up the possibility of a South American root for the Vernonia clade and perhaps indicates a propensity in the lineage for growing in or near water. The species V.incana is lectotypified.

"Do not Worry Your Head": The Impossibility of Indigenising Social Work Education and Practice in Africa

As the discussions and debates rage on about the content and direction of social work in Africa, the challenges associated with weaning the profession off its Western and North American roots become apparent. The desire to indigenise or make the profession culturally relevant is well articulated in the literature. Some efforts have been undertaken toward achieving this desire. However, it is evident that despite the numerous discussions and publications, it appears that efforts at indigenising, localising, or making social work culturally relevant have not made much progress. While what must be achieved is somewhat clear; how to achieve it and by what process remain a conundrum. The article, therefore, revisits the issue of making social work culturally relevant in Africa and its associated challenges. Despite the indictment of current social work education and practice in Africa, it appears that many academics and professionals have accepted that what is Western is global, fashionable, and functional, if not perfect. Given this, perhaps, “we should not worry our heads” about changing it. Instead, social work educators and practitioners in Africa should go back to the drawing board to determine how current social work education and practice can be blended with a traditional African knowledge base, approaches and models to reflect and align with the critical principles and ideals within the African context. This is with the hope of making the profession more relevant to the needs of the people of Africa.

The Missionary Position: The American Roots of Northrop Frye’s Peaceable Kingdom

Key to Canada’s attractiveness internationally is its characterization as a “peaceable kingdom,” a term famously used by Canadian scholar Northrop Frye in 1965 to articulate what makes Canada distinctive. In the conclusion to Literary History of Canada, Frye uses his reading of American folk art to put forth the concept of Canada as on “a quest for the peaceable kingdom,” citing works by two men (Erastus Salisbury Field’s Historical Monument of the American Republic and Edward Hicks’s Peaceable Kingdom) whose religious convictions also fundamentally shaped their artistic output to frame his argument. Through a closer examination of these canvases, the article explores how Frye’s idea of the peaceable kingdom is shaped by American religions and their missionary traditions—specifically Quakers and Methodists—and the historical flow of these religions across the Canada-US border, in combination with the influx of Loyalists northward and the subsequent commitment to missions that was part of British, American, and Canadian society. The American roots of Frye’s peaceable kingdom serve as a tangible reminder that borders are porous, and that those origins need to be acknowledged as a critical part of Canada’s self-construction.

Wkład antropologii kulturowej w studia nad niepełnosprawnością

Interdisciplinary studies on disability are conducted in the world by scholars from different disciplines and sub-disciplines, including special education. This article deals with an analysis of the evolution of the concept of disability studies and its’ implementation in anthropology that was narrowed to cultural anthropology, primarily of American roots with references to British social anthropology. The basic question, which I answer from the perspective of the cultural anthropologists, is formulated as follows: why cultural anthropology is important in the disability studies? I give answers in the context of: ontological, epistemological, rhetorical and political issues. Anthropological analyzes are preceded by definitions of disability studies after Stteven aylor, Bonnie Shoultz, Pamela Walker; Colin Barnes; Dan Goodley; Sharon L. Snyder; David T. Mitchell and Ronald J. Berger.

Occurrence of polyhouse vegetable pests in Kerala

Purposive survey was conducted in 82 polyhouses comprising 13 agro-ecological zones covering 12 districts of Kerala, during 2014–16 with a view to document the pests and natural enemies associated with salad cucumber, yard long bean, tomato, chilli, amaranthus, bittergourd and cabbage. Twenty eight species of pests were recorded in the study comprising of nineteen insect pests, five plant parasitic nematodes, two each of mite and mammalian pests. The incidence of mammalian pests in polyhouse is reported for the first time. American serpentine leaf miner, Liriomyza trifolii, cowpea aphid, Aphis craccivora, leaf caterpillar, Spodoptera litura, spider mite, Tetranychus truncates and root knot nematode, Meloidogyne incognita, were the predominant ones. The natural enemies recorded were Aenasius arizonensis, Coccinella transversalis, Scymnus coccivora, Oecophylla smaragdina Carcelia sp, and Argiope aurantia.

America Unbound: Encyclopedic Literature and Hemispheric Studies by Antonio Barrenechea

Reviewed by: America Unbound: Encyclopedic Literature and Hemispheric Studies by Antonio Barrenechea Charlotte Rogers Antonio Barrenechea. America Unbound: Encyclopedic Literature and Hemispheric Studies. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2016. xiv + 231 pp. In an era of multitasking and short attention spans, Antonio Barrenechea's critical analysis of the encyclopedic novel in the Americas is an outstanding model of the benefits of deeply studying long books. In America Unbound, Barrenechea examines four works of fiction that he calls "summa Americana," or great American novels of continental proportions (xi): Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Mexican Carlos Fuentes's Terra Nostra (1975), French Canadian Jacques Poulin's Volkswagen Blues (1984), and Native American Leslie Maron Silko's Almanac of the Dead (1991). Several thematic and formal [End Page 379] threads tie these works together: each novel explores the era before the American continent was separated by the imperial languages of Spanish, English, French, and Portuguese and divided into nations; each novel also features contemporary protagonists who critique the results of those divisions. Moreover, the works all have a "masterful performance inscribed within them" that self-consciously takes the entire American continent as its muse (10). The aim of Barrenechea's elegant and jargon-free book is to demonstrate how reading encyclopedic novels from different traditions reveals their shared American roots. Barrenechea takes as his theoretical point of departure the work of Herbert Eugene Bolton, an American historian whose 1932 "The Epic of Greater America" advocated for a continental rather than a national approach to American history. Bolton was undoubtedly a pioneer who wrote against the dominant paradigm of approaching US history without considering its inter-American aspects. Yet Bolton's ideas also had some fatal flaws: the Mexican historian Edmundo O'Gorman criticized him for practicing intellectual hegemony, and Barrenechea points out that Bolton was deeply Eurocentric and rarely considered the Amerindian or African experiences in the Americas. Barrenechea proposes to update Bolton's approach and enters into dialogue with more recent scholars who have spearheaded comparative American literary studies beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, including Vera Kutzinski, Earl Fitz, Lois Parkinson Zamora, and Gustavo Pérez Firmat. What makes Barrenechea's work new is his attention to the encyclopedic American novel, whose roots can be traced to colonial writings about the New World that attempted to enumerate and contain the marvelous abundance of the continent. His selected authors participate in this drive to create a compendium of the interrelated histories of peoples of the Americas, yet they do so in a critical postmodern fashion, demonstrating a "skepticism of totalizing projects" (32). The first work under consideration is Moby-Dick, a staple of the US literary canon that Barrenechea places in a broad continental setting. The rewards of this approach are immediately evident in his contextualization of the doubloon, a unit of Ecuadorian currency that circulated throughout the Americas in the nineteenth century. Melville, who could read Spanish and Portuguese, critiques US imperial ambitions by comparing the gold rush in California and its concomitant philosophy of manifest destiny to the Spanish legend of El Dorado. Ultimately, Barrenechea goes beyond canonical readings of Moby-Dick to show that the tale of the great white whale flourishes [End Page 380] "as an encyclopedic novel that recalls, and disrupts, imperial hemispheric legacies" (24). In Boltonian fashion, this first chapter reveals the deep connections between the United States and the Spanish Empire in the New World. In erudite discussions of the three twentieth-century novels, which make up the bulk of his study, Barrenechea delves deeply into the ways in which the authors depict the violent mestizaje that lies at the root of continental American history. They do so by inserting colonial texts directly into their encyclopedic novels. For example, the author shows how Fuentes mingles the content and form of imperial documents by Columbus and Cortés with contemporary characters in Terra Nostra to "deconstruct the temporal and spatial coordinates of established histories, languages, and nations" (60). While Fuentes is a canonical Spanish American writer, the other two authors discussed in Barrenechea's study occupy the traditionally marginalized intellectual spaces of Québécois and Native American literatures. In the Francophone Poulin's...

Los Perdidos

Los Perdidos Beth Alvarado (bio) My father-in-law was orphaned when he was child. He came to this country from Mexico, looking for his family and, although he didn't find them, he created his own. He worked on the roofs to support them. Hot-tar roofing, in Arizona, in the summer, is one of the hardest jobs; the temperatures on the roofs can get to 135 degrees. Although he never had even a basic education, he was fluent in two languages and could do complicated geometric equations in his mind. He was curious about everything, and would go to the University of Arizona Medical Center to listen to the public lectures or to Armory Park for the Mariachi Festival. He watched the news programs from Mexico almost obsessively, but he never went back, not even for a visit. Whenever my husband, Fernando, watched the news and there were stories about murders or gang violence, he would always say, "Please don't let it be a Mexican." He'd been born in Tucson, and his mother's family was at least fifth-generation: one side had a Spanish Land Grant near what is now Los Angeles and the other side had Native American roots. In other words, the border crossed them; they [End Page 25] didn't cross the border. His father had been born in the States, too, in California, although he grew up in Mexico. Still, Fernando self-identified as "Mexican," not "Mexican American," and certainly not "Hispanic" or "Latino" or even "Chicano." Gloria Anzaldúa explains it best when she writes, "We say nosotros los mexicanos (by mexicanos we do not mean citizens of Mexico; we do not mean a national identity but a racial one). We distinguish between mexicanos del otro lado and mexicanos de este lado. Deep in our hearts we believe that being Mexican has nothing to do with which country one lives in. Being Mexican is a state of soul—not one of mind, not one of citizenship." I didn't really notice this passage in her essay until after Fernando had died, so I'm not sure if he would have agreed, but I think so. If you ask our children "what are you?" they will both, like their father, answer "Mexican" without even thinking, so deep is their affection for and identification with his side of the family. "Mexican" even though there are times when, like their father, they don't feel "Mexican enough." When my daughter was about five, she asked me, "Aren't you at least part Mexican? Just a little bit?" I thought about it before I answered, because you shouldn't claim what isn't yours. "I am inside," I told her. "In my heart." ________ I was always the one who wanted to go to Mexico, to see the museums and Frida Kahlo's house in Mexico City, for instance, and to San Miguel de Allende. Fernando would always tell me it was too dangerous. We had gone once to San Carlos, a small beach town near Hermosillo, with my family when our children were small. I remember when we were at the border, going south, while we were waiting for my parents to get car insurance, some of the Mexican border guards were asking us about our children, if they were both ours. Because Michael was dark and Kathryn light, this was not an uncommon question, especially in the '70s. After all, even though people had intermarried in the borderlands for generations, Arizona had not repealed its antimiscegenation [End Page 26] laws until 1962. No one ever thought Michael was mine, and Fernando was always afraid they'd think he had kidnapped Kathryn, so he never went anywhere alone with her. The guards also asked, several times, if we were married, and checked our driver's licenses over and over. Back then, you didn't need a passport and there were no identification papers for children. Their persistent questions made Fernando nervous. Finally, when they walked out of earshot, he said, "Don't talk to them. Your Spanish is so bad, you're going to get the children taken away from us." In San...

Technocracy and Populism in Antitrust in the US and the EU

In recent decades we have perceived antitrust enforcement as a matter better left to technocrats. But this view is not self-evident: antitrust enforcement has only been a technocratic exercise for a short period of time; its (American) roots are much more firmly grounded in political movements than we may think. If we realise this, we may see that also technocratic antitrust enforcement is to a large extent informed by a particular political view – and that, by consequence, it can be challenged like all political views. In the last few years, a rejection of technocratic enforcement has become apparent which some – especially in the US – have described as “populist” or even “hipster” antitrust. After discussing how this came about in the US and drawing parallels in the EU, I will discuss some of its merit at the end of this paper.

Original sin: Frontier horror, gothic anxiety and colonial monsters in The Vampire Diaries

Abstract This article focuses on the CW television series The Vampire Diaries (TVD) (2009–17) and explores how the show uses literary tropes from the early American period commonly used to represent Native Americans. The television series reimagines colonial contact in a way that allows for a range of critical interpretations. The show at turns reproduces colonial rationalizations and rhetoric of land claim and discovery that disenfranchise Native peoples but also allows for ambivalent critiques of the colonial project. More particularly, this article asserts that the Mikaelson vampires (also referred to in the series as ‘The Originals’) replace Native Americans through their assumption of a proto-American identity, then displace actual Native American peoples to occupy the position of surrogate Indian, and finally erase what Native Studies scholars term the tribal real by reproducing fakelore that helps legitimize their American roots. The vampire characters in TVD see themselves as both elite and oppressed and position themselves as ‘surrogate Indians’, a characterization that harks back to some of the earliest depictions and records of historical Virginia as a royal colony filled with displaced elite supporters of the English monarchy.

Reunion or disconnection? Emotional labor among individual roots tourists who are second-generation Chinese Americans

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to illustrate the process of emotional work undertaken by Chinese Americans who independently visit their ancestral land without joining organized tours to define who they are and where they belong.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative approach was chosen, as few studies have investigated the experiences of individual roots tourists. Face-to-face, in-depth individual interviews were conducted with 25 Chinese American roots tourists. To analyze the data, a cross-case approach was used.FindingsThe interview narratives revealed that the interviewees have mixed feelings about being identified as Americans while they also made negative remarks about being identified as local Chinese. The close interaction with the locals emphasized, rather than blurred, the differences in language, political loyalty and economic status between the diaspora and local residents. The results show that Chinese Americans draw a clear boundary between themselves as “we” and locals as “they”.Originality/valueThis study explores the experiences of roots tourists who visit their ancestral land without joining an organized tour. This is a focus that has been lacking in the literature because past studies of roots tourism, particularly among second- and later-generation of immigrants, have predominantly focused on the experiences of those who join group tours to visit their ancestral country. The findings showed that similar to organized roots tourists, independent roots tourists experienced intense “emotional labor” in negotiating and making sense of competing identities, indicating that the social boundaries between the diaspora and local residents are enmeshed in their daily lives. This finding adds important knowledge to the literature on the tourism experiences of the diaspora, a growing segment of visiting friends and relatives market.

Roots and Development of the International Society for the Philosophy of Music Education (1985–2015)

This history traces the roots and development of the International Society for the Philosophy of Music Education (1985–2015). Taking a cross-disciplinary approach to historiography based on autobiographical reflection grounded in documentary evidence, it focuses on the people, events, and contributions of the society and the symposia out of which it grew and with which it was associated. Among the themes in this account are the American roots of the symposia, their growing internationalization and institutionalization, the founding of the Philosophy of Music Education Review and the International Society for the Philosophy of Music Education, evolving symposia structures, a democratic process of governance, the mentoring of philosophers and leaders in the community, and initiatives to strengthen the philosophical preparation of doctoral students in music education.

Eleanor Roosevelt's Place in History

Eleanor Roosevelt's Place in History Margaret C. Rung (bio) Patricia Bell-Scott. The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016. xix + 454 pp. Notes and index. $30.00. Susan Quinn. Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady. New York: Penguin Press, 2016. 404 pp. Illustrations, note on sources, notes, and index. $30.00. Recent books on Eleanor Roosevelt and her relationships with two women emphasize her extensive influence on U.S. politics and society. Activist, poet, legal scholar, and spiritual leader Pauli Murray, for instance, called ER the "mother" of second-wave feminism. Thus, the deeper we delve into ER's ideals, actions, successes, and failures, the more nuanced is our understanding of the trajectory of liberalism in the twentieth century. Admirably opting for accessibility in their respective studies of ER and Lorena ("Hick") Hickok, and ER and Anna Pauline ("Pauli") Murray, Susan Quinn and Patricia Bell-Scott use biography to explore not only the lives of ER, Hick, and Murray, but also the larger contexts in which they lived. As such, Quinn and Bell-Scott move women to the center of political history, communicating to a broad audience the mark these individual women left on the New Deal, feminism, and civil rights in the tumultuous years from the 1930s to the early 1980s. Moreover, by examining ER through the prism of her relationships, the authors underscore the dialectical nature of ER's political education as well as the boundaries that women navigated as they sought to craft policies to support class, racial, and gender justice. Taking as a given the importance of these women in shaping history, the authors have penned well-written and engaging books that should fit comfortably on the shelves of chain bookstores and reading lists of college syllabi. At the same time, their narratives tend to advance a great-person version of history that assumes the power of individuals to shape history. Accordingly, the dust jacket of Bell-Scott's book asserts that the Murray-ER friendship "helped to alter the course of race and racism in America"; Quinn's subtitle proclaims Hick's relationship with ER as "The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady." [End Page 484] The danger in such claims is that readers absorb a story about heroic people that stresses individual agency, leaving them with little sense of the broad forces, systems, and groups that move history. Fortunately, educators will find much in both books that will help students grasp the intersection of social movements with the lives of activist women. Most clearly, Bell-Scott's "portrait of a friendship" offers reflections on the long civil rights movement, as it illuminates Murray's unwavering commitment to racial justice and ER's growing cognizance of the depth and perniciousness of racial inequality. From an early age, Murray possessed a sophisticated grasp of systemic racism and fought against it. Her first letter to the White House, written to Franklin Roosevelt in 1938 (with a copy also sent to ER), presented a cogent analysis of race, class, and politics. In it, she explained how low wages and racism prevented her access to the training she needed to reach her full potential as an instructor on the WPA's Workers Education Project. Excluded from the University of North Carolina due to her race, she reviewed the myriad obstacles African Americans faced as they sought an equal footing with white citizens. Weaving her own family history into the letter, she highlighted her family's lengthy and patriotic American roots and called on FDR to stand up to white Southern Democrats. In her 1938 voice, we hear contemporary scholarly analyses on race and the New Deal, such as those expounded by Ira Katznelson in Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (2014). As her correspondence and then friendship with ER grew, Murray pushed ER to be a stronger advocate on behalf of civil rights. They drew closer during the ordeal to save sharecropper Odell Waller from execution after he killed a white landlord in self-defense. In this story...

Response to Fuambai’s Strength by Carlos David Londoño-Sulkin

Comment on Londano Sulkin, Carlos David. 2016. “Fuambai's Strength” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (3): 107–133.

Faith in War: The American Roots of Global Conflict

ABSTRACT: War has become a form of secular religion for many Americans in the modern era. Much of our deployment of military power during the last 50 years has rested on a set of absolute beliefs about the overall utility of war. In the process, policymakers and citizens alike maintain an enduring faith that the United States, via its military forces, has the power to transform societies abroad. Religious fundamentalism. For at least the last decade and a half, countless Americans have relied on this one phrase to help them interpret violence across the globe and most certainly in the Middle East. More often than not, the words and become easily conflated, convenient aphorisms explaining what drives contemporary conflict. Many Westerners tend to view Islamic fundamentalism as a medieval, if not primitive, outlook; its adherents as not simply lagging in social and cultural development but turning their backs on the modern world. In the process, the lines between identity groups blur. Whether Taliban, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, or the Islamic State, religious zealots--militants who have forsaken not only modernity but also Western values and the civilized world--are savages who kill apostates, Muslim and Christian alike, to purify the world. (1) If subversive Islamic fundamentalists selectively interpret the sacred text of the Quran to justify violence, is it possible Americans are equally discriminatory when defending their own, seemingly moral, obligations for waging war? (2) In truth, much of America's deployment of military power during the last 50 years, even back to the early twentieth century, rested on a set of absolute beliefs, convictions amounting to a sort of secular fundamentalism. Policymakers and citizens alike possess an enduring faith that the United States, via its military forces, has the power to transform societies abroad. While less religious in its call to arms than militant Islamic extremism, the devotion to reforming the order in the American image still has strong theological underpinnings. Senator Albert J. Beveridge illustratively exclaimed God had marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world in the late 1890s. (3) Over a century later, Chris S. Kyle, the American Sniper, deployed to the Middle East to fight against fanatics who hated us because we weren't Muslim. According to one account, Kyle, like many soldiers, was deeply religious and saw the Iraq War through that prism. (4) Such devotionals suggest many Americans feel war is not a necessary evil; it is simply necessary. This obligation to wage war rests on the conviction that nearly all American interventions abroad are both politically and morally justifiable. Even when questions are raised about legitimacy, such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Americans' faith in the transformative capacities of US military power is hardly dented. Thus, at the close of 2015, Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham could argue proper military strategy would enable the United States not only to destroy the Islamic State quickly but also to do so while creating conditions that can prevent it, or a threat like it, from ever re-emerging. (5) These aspirations rested on little evidence that the United States could achieve such far-reaching goals in a region stubbornly resistant to American influence. Moreover, dogmatic faith in what war can deliver limits serious debate about the utility of force in achieving foreign policy objectives. Since the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, most policy deliberations centered upon the mechanics of military strategy--troop strengths, stay-behind forces, and expansion of combat beyond certain countries' borders. Left unexamined is the potentially flawed supposition that war is in fact furthering US policy goals. Hence, Andrew J. Bacevich observes that even in an era of persistent conflict, few senior officials, even those in the Pentagon, can explain why war has become inescapable. …

Parameters – Full Issue – Winter 2016

Special Commentary: The Army's Identity Crisis by Gates Brown. Toward Strategic Solvency Ensuring Effective Military Voice, by William E. Rapp. The Crisis of American Military Primacy and the Search for Strategic Solvency, by Hal Brands and Eric Edelman. Are Our Strategic Models Flawed? Faith in War: The American Roots of Global Conflict by Gregory A. Daddis. Solving America's Gray-Zone Puzzle, by Isaiah Wilson III and Scott Smitson. Strategic Uncertainty, the Third Offset, and US Grand Strategy by Ionut C. Popescu. Ends + Ways + Means = (Bad) Strategy, by Jeffrey W. Meiser. Regional Issues in Asia: Turning It Up to Eleven: Belligerent Rhetoric in North Korea's Propaganda, by Mason Richey. Foreign Military Education as PLA Soft Power, by John S. Van Oudenaren and Benjamin E. Fisher

All Life Is a Circle: Poetry and the Search for My Native American Roots

In this personal essay, which includes five poems, the author uses poetry as a vehicle to recover, connect with, and explore her Native American ancestry. Her mother, who was one-quarter Wampanoag, was raised from age seven by a couple who taught her that Native American ancestry was something to hide. The poems are interwoven with the account of the author's struggle to retrieve a family story that has been intentionally suppressed. In the first poem, the author's connection to her Native American roots is reflected purely through her interest in and reverence for the earth and its creatures, but throughout the article, the connection becomes a progressively more specific bond with a particular ancestor and his tribe. As the author draws closer to identifying her Wampanoag great-grandfather through genealogical research and reaching out to Wampanoag tribes in Massachusetts, she also draws closer to his spirit, and she writes the final poem, “Wampanoag Clambake,” in his voice.

Tom Pickering

This article explores the initial encounter with jazz by Tom Pickering, and documents his musical development until the first Australian Jazz Convention in 1946. The AJC is a useful demarcation in time: the broad division in Australian jazz, which still exists, between those pursuing more traditional styles and those focused on modern styles (bebop and beyond) can be traced to this event. Through the examination of the early career of Pickering, the cultural transfer of jazz is explored. I argue that given the sociological environment, scarcity of materials and sheer enthusiasm for the American models, Australian jazz has at its core a distinctive sound that is nevertheless closely related to its American roots. Pickering represents the typical encounter and pursuit of jazz in Australia during the first half of the twentieth century: a teenage introduction to dance music and hot music, experimentation with instrumental performance given little to no tuition, appropriation of the music by imitation of recordings individually and within a group setting, and the relentless consumption of all available information connected to the art form. By taking Pickering as a case study, I will demonstrate the initial period of exposure and appropriation that is common to many Australian jazz musicians, which was crucial in the formation of an Australian jazz sound. Through the dissection of the developmental processes of a typical Australian jazz musician in the former half of the twentieth century, this article sheds new light on the identity of Australian jazz and demonstrates modalities concerning the international movement of musical form. Aside from Bruce Johnson’s work in The Inaudible Music and Timothy Steven’s study of The Red Onions Jazz Band, there is little documentation of the processes of appropriation of traditional jazz styles undertaken by Australian musicians. This paper explores the initial encounter with jazz by Tom Pickering, and documents his musical development until the first Australian Jazz Convention in 1946. The AJC is a useful demarcation in time: the broad division in Australian jazz, which still exists, between those pursuing more traditional styles and those focused on modern styles (bebop and beyond) can be traced to this event. Through the examination of the early career of Pickering, the cultural transfer of jazz is explored. I argue that given the sociological environment, lack of endemic culture, scarcity of materials and sheer enthusiasm for the American models, Australian jazz has at its core a distinctive sound that is nevertheless closely related to its American roots. Pickering represents the typical encounter and pursuit of jazz in Australia during the first half of the 20th century: a teenage introduction to dance music and ‘hot’ music via radio and gramophone, experimentation with instrumental performance given little to no tuition, appropriation of the music by imitation of recordings individually and within a group setting, and the relentless consumption of all available information connected to the art form. Through the analysis of recordings and journals from the period, and Pickering’s own autobiographical notes, I will elucidate the role of the local importer in the creation of a differentiated jazz approach. By taking Pickering as a case study, I will demonstrate the initial period of exposure and appropriation that is common to many Australian jazz musicians, which was crucial in the formation of an Australian jazz sound. Through the dissection of the developmental processes of a typical Australian jazz musician in the former half of the 20th century, this paper sheds new light on the identity of Australian jazz and demonstrates modalities concerning the international movement of musical form.

The Principle of Legality and a Common Law Bill of Rights - Clear Statement Rules Head Down Under

This article traces the evolution in Australia of fundamental rights protection provided by the courts. It is a fascinating and controversial story that at its most critical moments was (and continues to be) informed by American constitutional law design and statutory interpretation principles. On one level that is no surprise when ‘it may be said that, roughly speaking, the Australian Constitution is a redraft of the American Constitution of 1787 with modifications found suitable for the more characteristic British institutions and for Australian conditions.’ But what is extraordinary is that the decision of the framers of the Australian Constitution to consciously reject American notions of formal rights guarantees has not, ultimately, been decisive in this regard. As Sir Anthony Mason - one of the leading figures central to the new judicial rights consciousness in Australia - noted, portentously, in 1995 ‘[j]ust as the courts can protect common law rights by applying presumptive rules of construction, so they can protect fundamental rights, even in the absence of constitutional entrenchment and statutory backing.’ And so it has proven to be. The Australian High Court has transformed an old interpretive canon (with American roots) into a strong Australian species of clear statement rule for fundamental rights called the principle of legality. It has done so to fill the lacuna in formal rights protection in Australia and to temper (if not outright resist) increasingly common legislative attempts to eradicate fundamental rights. The Court has used the application of the principle of legality to construct (and robustly protect from legislative encroachment) a quasi-constitutional common law bill of rights. In order to normatively justify these developments the High Court has turned towards the inherently contested principles of the Australian Constitution to anchor the principle of legality and the interpretive process more generally. This has, controversially, occurred as part of a foundational shift in judicial doctrine and practice that considers legislative intention to be the product not the lodestar of statutory interpretation.