Exotic Creatures Research Articles

Identifying Consciousness in Other Creatures: Three Initial Steps.

Identifying consciousness in other creatures, be they animals or exotic creatures that have yet to be discovered, remains a great scientific challenge. We delineate the first three steps that we think are necessary for identifying consciousness in other creatures. Step 1 is to define the particular kind of consciousness in which one is interested. Step 2 is to identify, in humans, the key differences between the brain processes that are associated with consciousness and the brain processes that are not associated with consciousness. For Step 2, to identify these differences, we focus on passive frame theory. Step 3 concerns how the insights derived from consciousness research on humans (e.g., concerning these differences) can be generalized to other creatures. We discuss the significance of examining how consciousness was fashioned by the process of evolution, a process that could be happenstance and replete with incessant tinkering, yielding adaptations that can be suboptimal and counterintuitive, far different in nature from our efficiently designed robotic systems. We conclude that the more that is understood about the differences between conscious processing and unconscious processing in humans, the easier it will be to identify consciousness in other creatures.

A Beast to Be Slain: The Tiger and the Unquenched Desire of Man

Abstract: Ever since the British colonists blessed tiger hunting as the cardinal "royal" sport of the Haut monde , a surge of interest took place among the leisure class to travel to the British Raj in order to re-practice their ancestral fox hunting on foreign hunting grounds—this time with a more fearsome quarry. Since tigers were considered exotic and fierce creatures, overpowering these beasts secured a certain cachet for the victor, signifying his virility and manliness. As a result, the encounter between man and the tiger—both in the metaphoric and non-metaphoric sense—provided a literary trope for the twentieth-century writers who associated the animal with the erotic hunger of the male protagonists. By studying the traditional beliefs surrounding these mystical creatures, the present article reads some of the notable literary fictions of the twentieth century that use the tiger as a central animal motif— The Beast in the Jungle (1903), Death in Venice (1912), and The Remains of the Day (1989)—in light of each other.

A Beast to Be Slain: The Tiger and the Unquenched Desire of Man

Abstract: Ever since the British colonists blessed tiger hunting as the cardinal "royal" sport of the Haut monde , a surge of interest took place among the leisure class to travel to the British Raj in order to re-practice their ancestral fox hunting on foreign hunting grounds—this time with a more fearsome quarry. Since tigers were considered exotic and fierce creatures, overpowering these beasts secured a certain cachet for the victor, signifying his virility and manliness. As a result, the encounter between man and the tiger—both in the metaphoric and non-metaphoric sense—provided a literary trope for the twentieth-century writers who associated the animal with the erotic hunger of the male protagonists. By studying the traditional beliefs surrounding these mystical creatures, the present article reads some of the notable literary fictions of the twentieth century that use the tiger as a central animal motif— The Beast in the Jungle (1903), Death in Venice (1912), and The Remains of the Day (1989)—in light of each other.

Strange Sea Creatures

Book Review| March 01 2023 Strange Sea Creatures Strange Sea Creatures. By Erich Hoyt. 2020. Firefly Books. (ISBN 9780228102977). 112 pp. Hardcover, $24.95. Kirstin Milks, Kirstin Milks Department Editor Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Frank Brown Cloud, Frank Brown Cloud Department Editor Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Julie Minbiole, Julie Minbiole associate professor of biology Columbia College Chicago, Department of Science and Mathematics, Chicago, Illinois jminbiole@colum.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Stephen Traphagen Stephen Traphagen science teacher Oak Park and River Forest High School, Oak Park, Illinois stephen@mrtraphagen.com Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar jminbiole@colum.edu stephen@mrtraphagen.com The American Biology Teacher (2023) 85 (3): 176. https://doi.org/10.1525/abt.2023.85.3.176a Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Julie Minbiole, Stephen Traphagen; Strange Sea Creatures. The American Biology Teacher 1 March 2023; 85 (3): 176. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/abt.2023.85.3.176a Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentThe American Biology Teacher Search Strange Sea Creatures explores unusual marine organisms from all over the world, organized for the reader by their depth below the surface. The photos in this book (taken from biologists’ and divers’ explorations) are stunning, and the contrast between organisms and the dark background allows the reader to focus on the small and intricate anatomical details of these exotic creatures. As stated in the introduction, many of the organisms pictured have yet to be fully characterized and studied, so the descriptive text is often sparse, but it highlights how incomplete our exploration of the marine world continues to be. Readers looking for detailed information about these organisms will need additional resources, but this book shines as a collection of biology-related artwork evoking curiosity and appreciation for the vast array of marine habitats and fauna. You do not currently have access to this content.

Reading Michelle Kwan: cultural meanings of her youthfulness and hyper-sexual/exotic transformation in the 1994–1996 seasons

This paper examines how the US media represented Michelle Kwan by focusing on her ‘surprising’ transformation to a sophisticated and mature image in performing the role of Salome, the biblical temptress. We argue that the narratives are closely related to two Asian/American stereotypes. First, the media subjected Kwan to an infantilizing gaze that reflects a classically racialized stereotype: that is, Asian/Americans look much younger than they actually are. Second, the transformation that coach Frank Carroll devised for Kwan erased her individuality and submerged her subject formation as an Asian/American woman in the stereotypical straitjacket of a hyper-sexual, exotic creature, which is pervasive in popular culture. By interrogating these two perspectives through a post- colonial lens, we argue that the symbolic world of women’s figure skating can be understood as an anthropological site of white aesthetic imperialism in which neo-colonial visions of the child/primitive and sexual fantasy are projected onto Kwan.

‘She Was Such an Exotic Creature’: Feeding the Orientalist Machine in Agatha Christie’sMurder in Mesopotamia

The Orientalist scenario that Agatha Christie’s Murder in Mesopotamia displays is an incontestable representation of the ‘Orient’ as an exoticised ‘Other’ that menaces Western civilization with its inherent tendency towards depravation and savagery. In Christie’s novel, the archaeological site configures a terrain wherein civilisation is safeguarded because controlled by Westerners and yet, civilisation is disrupted the moment a murder is committed and everything indicates that the murderer is ‘one of us’, not the oriental ‘Other’. However, the stranger that endangers the civilising integrity of an otherwise unpolluted, commendable Orientalist enterprise by murdering ‘one of us’ is none other than the victim, Mrs Leidner, who goes through an orientalising process that premeditatedly transforms her into the essential Oriental female, the Belle Dame sans Merci. This article aims at unmasking how the Orientalist plot of Murder in Mesopotamia is strategically used to condemn the woman, the victim, and exonerate the murderer, the husband. Hence, the ‘Oriental’ female that lurks behind Mrs Leidner’s ‘blonde, Scandinavian fairness’ ( Mesopotamia 28) is exposed whereas Dr Leidner’s past as a German spy is conspicuously undermined. What this Orientalist plot ultimately unveils is the prescience of ‘whiteness’ as a discursively constructed category just as elusive as gender.

Brazilian manatees (re)discovered: Early modern accounts reflecting the overexploitation of aquatic resources and the emergence of conservation concerns

The relationship between indigenous people and manatees in Brazil dates back to prehistoric times. It has been the subject of interdisciplinary research by specialists in marine environmental history, ethnozoology and anthropology. Manatee species, Thrichechus inunguis and Thrichechus manatus, form part of the local culture and traditions of their distribution regions: subtropical and tropical regions, as well as the entire Amazon basin and its Atlantic range. The estimated number of manatees in Brazil when the Europeans first arrived was in the tens of thousands. But the several uses of this exotic, large and strange New World creature not only meant that it featured from early times in literature, folklore and mythology, but also led to hunting and therefore falling populations. We have collected information from documentary sources that referred to manatees. These derived mainly from the early modern era, and included travel books, letters from Portuguese and Spanish missionaries and explorers, chronicles, scientific treatises, illustrated broadsheets, leaflets and images in naturalists’ records, sailors’ reports, folklore sources, poetry and literature. Our main goal was to frame and discuss the first historical accounts of the human exploitation, uses and perceptions of manatees in the Americas. This facilitated analysis of the abundance and uses of manatees from the sixteenth century to this day, as well as discussion of conservation issues, which started to emerge during the mid-eighteenth century, around overexploited resources in colonial Brazil. In focusing on manatees, and other aquatic animals, we offer paradigmatic case studies of past ecosystems and the historical relationships between people and nature.

The Academic Zoo: Student Profiles, Class Design and Teaching Style

We call it a “zoo” when we see a gathering of disorderly, out-of-control people. Yet, any zookeeper will tell you their environments are calm and organized. Knowing the unique nature of their inhabitants and accommodating their species-specific needs makes for an educational environment for all. The Academic Zoo is no different. This paper introduces four profiles of the exotic creature, the freshman, and describes how they congregate in four types of First Year Seminars. The author proposes four teaching styles for these seminars, effective in attending to their distinct nature and keeping this zoo from becoming a circus.

Apes and Elephants: In Search of Sensation in the Tropical Imaginary

This paper will explore the tropical exotic in relation to the widespread European fascination with tropical animals exhibited in zoos throughout the long nineteenth century. Zoos became places where human animals could experience the chill of a backbone shiver as they came face to face with the animal/other. It will examine the establishment of the first zoos in relation to Harriet Ritvo’s argument that their major imperative was one of classification and control. On the one hand, the zoo fulfilled the public’s desire for wild, exotic creatures while, on the other hand, the zoo reassured the public that its major purpose was control of the natural world encapsulated by the stereotype of tropical excess. I will argue that these various places of exhibition created an uncanny zone in which the European subject was able to encounter its animal self while reaffirming an anthropocentric world view.

Drifting by Katia D. Ulysse (review)

Reviewed by: Drifting by Katia D. Ulysse Lindsey Scott Drifting. By Katia D. Ulysse. New York: Akashic Books, 2014. ISBN 978-1-61775-240-7. 254 pp. $15.95. Katia D. Ulysse’s debut novel Drifting comprises a series of short glimpses into the lives of Haitian and Haitian American families. Divided into five parts and twenty-two chapters, the book weaves together snapshots of Haitian life for a number of tangentially connected families. Ulysse’s style recalls that of Edwidge Danticat as she links seemingly unrelated short stories into a novel that is greater than the sum of its parts. Covering a time period from the Duvalier era to the present, and spanning a geographic distance from Port-au-Prince to New York City, this novel foregrounds a wide range of Haitian experiences and suggests a certain universality to the Haitian experience across boundaries of race, residency, and social class. Ulysse highlights a striking tension between those in Haiti and those in the dyaspora: almost all characters living in Haiti express some level of desire to leave, but contrary to their idealistic notions, Ulysse illustrates that the fates of those who are able to leave are not necessarily better than those of the people who stay. In the first part, “The Least of These,” Ulysse recounts the story of a Haitian couple living in the United States who go through the trauma of a stillbirth and decide to return to Haiti for Kanaval in the wake of this trauma as a way to “jolt [them] into being a couple again” (15). Their loss, however, cannot be escaped. In fact, the earthquake of January 12, 2010, hits just after their arrival. This opening scene highlights a recurring theme in the novel: tragedy and hardship cannot simply be outrun, either by leaving Haiti or by returning. In the aftermath of the earthquake, an unnamed Haitian woman approaches her US boss to ask for bereavement leave. Recounted only in the boss’s voice, this interaction explores the variety of definitions that exist for “family.” Having gone through the “typical” familial relationships, e.g., mother, father, child, the boss scoffs: “The lady who took care of you for ten years while your parents immigrated to another country to work and send money so you could eat and go to school … sorry, not on the list either. … The lady’s children? Come on, are you kidding me?” (25). These words reflect significant differences in the notions of family across cultures as well as the lack of interpersonal understanding that negatively impacts the lives of all of the characters in Ulysse’s novel. The second, third, and fourth parts, “Flora,” “Yseult,” and “Sagesse,” respectively, recount the lives of three young Haitian girls whose families [End Page 213] all, at varying times, decide to leave Haiti for the United States. Life there, however, is not as glamorous as they had anticipated; each of them is forced into unpleasant or even dangerous circumstances as a means to survive. They are subjected to harassing or pitying comments such as “Isn’t she an exotic creature? Like one of those new bird species they found in the jungles of … Indonesia, was it?” and “Ah. Haiti. Yes. The poorest nation in the Western hemisphere” (157). All three remember their lives in Haiti with a nostalgic fondness that suggests their sense of unfulfilled potential in the United States. These challenging circumstances in the United States, however, do not negate the challenges for those living in Haiti. In the fifth part of the novel, “Casseus,” Ulysse tells the story of the Casseus family in Haiti, before the births of the three girls central to the novel. The section recounts a series of tragic accidents and manipulations that demonstrate, in part, why the families in question may have decided to leave. In this sense, while the girls and women in the story have difficult lives in the United States, Ulysse does not allow nostalgia for an idyllic Haiti to overpower the narrative. Rather, she writes of one character, “He had told the consul all about his dreams of becoming something more. He had said that the United States of America was the only...

Assembling the dodo in early modern natural history.

This paper explores the assimilation of the flightless dodo into early modern natural history. The dodo was first described by Dutch sailors landing on Mauritius in 1598, and became extinct in the 1680s or 1690s. Despite this brief period of encounter, the bird was a popular subject in natural-history works and a range of other genres. The dodo will be used here as a counterexample to the historical narratives of taxonomic crisis and abrupt shifts in natural history caused by exotic creatures coming to Europe. Though this bird had a bizarre form, early modern naturalists integrated the dodo and other flightless birds through several levels of conceptual categorization, including the geographical, morphological and symbolic. Naturalists such as Charles L'Ecluse produced a set of typical descriptive tropes that helped make up the European dodo. These long-lived images were used for a variety of symbolic purposes, demonstrated by the depiction of the Dutch East India enterprise in Willem Piso's 1658 publication. The case of the dodo shows that, far from there being a dramatic shift away from emblematics in the seventeenth century, the implicit symbolic roles attributed to exotic beasts by naturalists constructing them from scant information and specimens remained integral to natural history.

You Could Have Been There (Unmasking the Fictional Voice)

[T]he mask, given time, comes to be the face itself.-Marguerite Yourcenar.The author of that great baggy novel Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne, put it more simply than I intend to here, when he said, pen guides me, I guide not The unfolding of the story, that is, through invented characters who on closer examination turn out to be not distant and exotic creatures but intimates to the life of the author.I was having coffee with my wife in our sunroom when she said to me, Remember how excited you were when you discovered Spiess's voice. It was a revelation to you and you kept talking about it. You said things like, 'Spiess could write this book for me.' Finding Spiess's voice was a liberation for you, my wife said. She looked at me: Don't you remember? I said, I'd forgotten. But she was right. It was the first time it had happened to me. Finding the voice of this wholly imaginary character nearly a quarter of a century ago while I was struggling to write my third novel, The Ancestor Game, signaled the end of the agony and the beginning of the joy of writing that book. These days I would know it at once, that magical offer, that prompt from the unconscious, the authentic intervention of the imagination, the sense of wonder, and I would grab it and run with it. Back then I was simply astonished and humbly grateful. Humbly because I had no idea where the giftof Spiess's voice came from and felt no responsibility for it. It was my first experience of writing above myself. My first experience of being in the zone with the work. August Spiess, a German medical doctor and orientalist living in Shanghai in 1927. I thought him an exotic figure as far removed from any autobiographical connection with me as it was possible to be. But I was wrong about that.In the following excerpt, Dr. Spiess is a visitor in the house of Madame Feng's father, the aged Wen-Jen artist, in the old city of Hangzhou. Dr. Spiess has just delivered Madame Feng of the little boy who is in later years to become his pupil and will be the principal character in the story. Spiess writes in his Journal that night:My emotions compel me to record the event. Two hours ago, at seven o'clock this morning, Madame Feng was delivered of a son after an heroic labor of more than twenty seven hours duration. When I leftthem a moment ago they were both sleeping. A little after one this morning, at that hour when the human will sinks to its lowest point and the aged and the sick give up the ghost, I believed she was entirely spent. I decided there could no longer be any hope of saving them both. Despite the certainty that I would thereby earn Feng's undying enmity, I decided without hesitation to sacrifice the life of his son in order to save the life of his wife. I saw how Madame Feng was slipping deeper every minute into a state of great depletion. Without either assistance or the proper facilities, and in her weakened condition, a caesarean delivery of the infant was not possible. I did not consider it, but readied myself for the gruesome task of butchery that lay before me. As I prepared my instruments by the uncertain lamplight in her cold room, observed all the while from the shadows by the two old women who had been attending her before my arrival, I reflected with a strange detachment that I felt no fear of Feng. As the moment approached for me to use the knife it was not of myself that I thought but of the child, whose torso and limbs hung helplessly from her body, its head locked firmly behind the android formation of its mother's ungenerous pelvic bone. When I moved to the side of the bed to do my work Madame Feng must have sensed my purpose, for she opened her eyes and spoke to me. I do not know by what means she roused herself from the deep exhaustion into which her labors had driven her; there is no sufficient medical explanation to account for such a re-awakening. It was if she had visited a secret shrine hidden within the far recesses of her soul and there been granted a renewal of her will. …

Beauty and the Beast: Animals in the Visual and Material Culture of the Toilette

Beauty and the Beast: Animals in the Visual and Material Culture of the Toilette Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell (bio) In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the toilette evolved from a single object, the petit toile that covered the dressing table, to a set of objects, and from a set of objects to a daily ritual, synonymous with the morning hours.1 The highly codified rites of the toilette were re-enacted over and over again in eighteenth-century art, not only by beautiful women, but also by monkeys and butterflies.2 Indeed, animals played a central role in the visual and material culture of the toilette. Both exotic and domestic creatures were depicted as frequent witnesses to—and sometimes anthropomorphic participants in—the toilette. Animals lurk in corners and chairs and under tables in so many toilette scenes that they cannot be dismissed as mere props or accessories; the symbiotic connection between beauty and the beast demands further investigation. Although ostensibly private, the toilette was, in practice, extremely public. Louis XIV and his mother, Anne of Austria, had instituted the custom of dressing—or, rather, being dressed—in front of privileged courtiers.3 This royal ritual was imitated by women (and men) of the nobility and haute bourgeoisie, who transformed it from an exercise in political power and proximity into a domestic celebration of taste and sociability, one frequently depicted in genre scenes and portraits. Not only the carefully choreographed event itself, but its elegant accoutrements, were calculated to impress and entice. [End Page 147] Just as the toilette transitioned from a royal to a bourgeois pastime, so did keeping pets. As Glynis Ridley has observed, “the eighteenth century was a time not only of rapid expansion of the natural world but also of rapidly changing relationships between human and non-human animals.”4 New species were being discovered and classified at an unprecedented rate; once-exotic animals were becoming familiar sights in Europe. It has been well documented—notably by Louise E. Robbins—that pets of all kinds grew more common in homes at all levels of French society during the eighteenth century: dogs, cats, monkeys, parrots, cockatoos, canaries, finches, and, occasionally, small rodents.5 Although there were a number of male pet owners, in art and literature pets were associated with women and girls almost exclusively. Robbins attributes this to “the romantic and erotic connotations aroused by the close physical and emotional bonds between owner and animal,” and argues that at a time when wealth was beginning to replace birth in determining social status, pets—and especially exotic pets—were a desirable form of conspicuous consumption.6 The same can be said of the toilette. Although men and women alike held toilettes attended by friends, family members, clergymen, servants, and tradesmen, it was the female toilette that became a recurring theme in French art and print culture. Like female pet ownership, the female toilette carried connotations both erotic and economic. The taste for toilette scenes spanned history painting, genre scenes, and portraits, combining the ancient vanitas tradition with the ultramodern tableau de mode. Pets lent these scenes credibility and visual interest, but they also functioned as convenient symbols, whether of status, sexuality, exoticism, or human foibles. Indeed, artists were attracted to their human characteristics as much as their distinctively bestial colors and textures. Birds—especially parrots—flock to toilette scenes. Parrots were not only rare, beautiful, and expensive, but they could mimic human speech, which made them good companions as well as handy human surrogates in art. The parrot’s splendid plumage came at a price; the gaudier the parrot, the more expensive it was.7 However, like mirrors and burning candles, parrots were traditional emblems of mortality in addition to being a standard components of toilette tables, providing a reminder of the fleeting nature of beauty and the futility of attempting to mask the ravages of time. Equally exotic if less colorful and loquacious, the cockatoo is distinguished by its crest of curled feathers, which can be raised or lowered at will. In François Boucher’s painting Le Matin: La Dame à sa Toilette (now lost, it survives as an engraving by Gilles-Edmé Petit), the...

Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture Gala Argent (bio) Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture by Donna Landry Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. 248pp. US$52. ISBN 978-0-8018-9028-4. Donna Landry has done what Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), a French zoologist and paleontologist, declared he could do: "Tell me the horse of a population. I'll tell you about its customs and institutions." Between 1650 and 1750, more than two hundred horses of Eastern origin—Arabians, North African Barbs, and Turkoman or Turanian horses from Central Asia—were imported to England and crossbred to indigenous breeds. With these animals came Eastern ideas about the horse-human relationship that were quite at odds with prevailing British beliefs. In five essays, Landry analyzes the verbal and visual record in order to bring to light the impacts these exotic creatures and ideas had on English culture during the early modern period. Narratives that include horses as agents of cultural change remain rare. In most scholarship that includes horses, they, like other nonhuman animals, are studied as modes of transport or sport, as receptacles of [End Page 255] symbolic meaning, or as they are exploited or abused. This view is at odds with the lived experience of those who interact with actual horses. In reaching beyond these conventional academic approaches, Landry poses a question that horse people will find entirely sensible: "Might not horses have had some effects on human culture as well as the other way around?" (14). With this question in mind, Landry deftly intertwines the importation of Eastern horses and Eastern concepts with British social structures. These Eastern horses were characterized as finer and tougher than British horses of the time. They also were recognized as loyal, intelligent, sensitive, and even as "peculiarly rational" (16) and "chivalrous" (120) companions in the stories that travelled from the East with them. As such, they need not be, indeed could not be, dealt with in the old way, and new styles of training, riding, and keeping were needed to accommodate their particular ways of being. In the first two chapters, Landry argues that the new equestrian cultures of sporting, hunting, and racing fostered a new style of riding, "free forward movement" (3), that reflected English cultural values. Drastically breaking with the precise and rigidly controlled tradition of the dressage school that was in fashion among the courts and with the gentry across greater Europe and the British Isles, this freer style of riding involved trusting the horse at speed and on a loose rein. As a "fully embodied ideology" (4), Landry argues, the "free forward movement" and the particular style of riding that went with it also referenced a loosening of control in a broader political sense and served as a potent metaphor for liberal political values, where it both reflected and fostered England's imperial ambitions and growing mercantile and leisure classes. Histories often tell of horses as a kind, but rarely outside of equestrian circles do we hear of "this horse." In chapter 3, Landry tracks the manner of acquisition—through war, trade, and diplomatic gifting—of three named Eastern sires with English endeavours, juxtaposing the growing importance of breeding and pedigree in horses and humans to English nationalism. Chapter 4 continues the theme of individual horses by providing a "cultural biography" (108) of the Bloody Shouldered Arabian, a horse whose story reflects his value as a foreign commodity and also recognizes his individual character. In eighteenth-century discourse, Landry posits, both art and text presented horses as sentient and rational, and "humans and horses became increasingly interchangeable" (126). Chapter 6 addresses how the Eastern tradition of lenient, kind ways of interacting with horses as family members and partners, arguably necessitated by the intelligent sensitivity of the Eastern horses, led to more harmonious relationships [End Page 256] with these animals in England. These beliefs also provided a springboard for political critique of the very institutions that brought the horses to British soil. Here, for example, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver, "saturated with Houyhnhnm lore, turns the world upside down in a radical way, and in doing so reveals how animals, servants, colonial subject...

The Lady and the Eel: how Aphra Behn introduced Europeans to the "numb eel"

Aphra Behn (1640-1689) has been called the first professional British female writer. Behn probably visited Surinam in the 1660s, but it was not until 1688 that she wrote Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave, the novel for which she is best remembered. Although overlooked by historians of science, Oroonoko provided a description of the "numb eel," effectively introducing many Europeans to the exotic and frightening creature that would become known as the "electric eel" during the second half of the 1700s, when it would play a central role in showing the reality of animal electricity, effectively putting neuromuscular physiology on its more modern course. This article examines Behn's early life, including why she might have gone to Surinam, the sources that might have helped her write her colorful description of the eel, and how what she had written circulated widely and continued to contribute to the changing scientific landscape after her death.

Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women in Film

Reviewed by: Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women in Film Chris Stone M. Elise Marubbio Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women in Film University of Kentucky Press, 2006; $30 Scholars have tended to encode the cinematic Indian as male, relegating Native women to the periphery. In challenging this literature, M. Elise Marubbio refrains from engaging the entire range of screen representations of Native women. Instead, she focuses on the “Celluloid Maiden,” an alluring, exotic young woman who engenders her own demise by entering into a relationship with the white hero. As she stresses, the Celluloid Maiden, is neither a static nor a monolithic figure. Variations exist; filmmakers decide which elements to incorporate; their choices, in turn, speak to the broader cultural and political milieu in which they operate. Despite these variations, Marubbio contends that the Celluloid Maiden, as the romantic, doomed avatar of a vanishing people, has sabotaged attempts to depict Native Americans with greater sensitivity and empathy. Marubbio traces the Celluloid Maiden back to the silent era, foregrounding two subtypes: the Celluloid Princess and the Sexualized Maiden. As the female counterpart of the ignoble savage, the Sexualized Maiden, as mandated by her “savage” blood, is a promiscuous, sexually aggressive femme fatale of mixed parentage who threatens to castrate white males. If this figure endangers white masculinity, violates sexual mores, and stokes fears of moral and racial degradation, filmmakers manage these threats to the social order by killing her off. In contrast, the Celluloid Princess “symbolizes the ‘best’ of Native America” (6). She is unspoiled, innocent, exotic, beautiful, and open to engagement with white culture. In “helper” films, the Celluloid Princess, in gratitude for a past kindness, sacrifices her life to warn whites of an impending Indian attack. In “lover” films, the Celluloid Princess marries and procreates with a transplanted Easterner seeking sanctuary in the West. With time, a crisis imperils their interracial union. Either she discovers that her husband loves another (white) woman, or she realizes [End Page 44] she cannot forsake her people and accompany him on his return to the East, or she becomes inconsolable after her husband enrolls their child in an eastern school. Whatever the crisis, the resolution is the same: she commits suicide, thereby releasing her husband from his obligations, facilitating his return to “civilization,” and ensuring the benefits of civilization for their progeny. The Sexualized Maiden and Celluloid Princess each receded from screens in the 1930s (for reasons Marubbio never adequately foregrounds). A lustier, deadlier, more wanton Sexualized Maiden did reemerge, however, in the 1940s. As in the silent era, these films encoded female assertiveness as deviant, racialized promiscuity, conjoined miscegenation with degeneracy, and cast interracial romance and female sexuality as threats in need of containment. If Sexualized Maidens continued to appear through the 1960s, Marubbio argues that filmmakers fused the Sexualized Maiden and Celluloid Princess into a hybrid figure in the early 1970s. The catalyst for this merger was the ascendancy of the revisionist western, which recast westward expansion as a tragic tale of murder and dispossession rather than an inspiring story of progress and nation-building. The Celluloid Maiden in these films, while as sexually assertive as the Sexualized Maiden of yesteryear, earned admiration, not scorn. Filmmakers cast the Celluloid Maiden as a harbinger of the sexual revolution and used her to inveigh against a “civilization” they deemed repressive. On the other hand, while these maidens resembled Celluloid Princesses in that they were full-bloodied Indians of social standing who entered into romantic relationships with whites, hybrid maidens practiced a markedly different brand of assimilation. Rather than seeking acceptance among whites, they detached their white lovers from “civilization.” Yet, for all of their good intentions and countercultural leanings, revisionist westerns, according to Marubbio, were less progressive than advertised. The Celluloid Maiden still died, an outcome that not only perpetuated the image of Native Americans as noble, exotic creatures destined for extinction, but also undercut the revisionist film’s bid to posit Indian culture as a viable alternative to the status quo. As revisionist films attest, the historically and ideologically laden baggage of genre can subtly undermine the liberal intentions of filmmakers. If Marubbio demonstrates nothing...

Tech Sales Pays Off [Career Advisor: Experiences from the Real World

Janet Flores, executive and global account manager for Rockwell Automation, a worldwide engineering and construction firm headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is a member of the technical sales team and is currently responsible for projects in the oil and gas industry. Though her focus is in oil and gas, Rockwell is involved in many industries, including entertainment engineering. From controlling a roller coaster racing at 120 mi/h, helping to protect an investment in valuable exotic creatures, or providing secure transportation to ski runs, Flores says Rockwell works with customers to help them fulfill their project requirements, whether it be automation at the industry's largest entertainment theme parks, Broadway shows, or other venues.

Josephine Baker's Colonial Pastiche

This essay explores the first full-length film featuring Josephine Baker: La Sirene des tropiques, produced in 1927. It emphasizes the film’s display of myriad facets of in terwar French colonial culture and the place of that display in Baker’s life and evolving celebrity. Baker’s genius, it argues, lies in her playful juxtaposition of the full range of roles defined by the French empire. W hen she was almost twenty years old, Josephine Baker personified sex. Well-dressed older men, thoroughly middle class and civilized in their everyday lives, would gasp, tightly gripping the armrests of their chairs, their hearts pounding with excitement, when the bright stage lights first settled on her dark, naked body. White women, if they were present, were horrified and greeted her appearance with clenched teeth and a scan dalized sneer. The dusky temptress—some called her the “black tiger”— had come to Paris at an early age, leaving behind her birthplace in the American heartland and claiming the Jazz Age charms of Harlem cabarets, the Broadway stage, and, finally, the Folies Bergere and La revue negre. She had come of age at an unusually perverse moment in American and European history, when whites hungered for undiluted “African” or “Negro” art as a panacea for the “overcivilization” that had so recently driven the world to war. With preternatural cunning, Baker exploited this eagerness for something real, something not so refined and restrained, and transformed herself into an icon of race and sex. With her electrifying “caramel” skin tone and her association with the various primitivisms of the sensational danse savage, she became the world’s first colored super star. At the peak of her celebrity, she would stroll down the Champs-Elysees with a cheetah on a leash, two exotic creatures, objects of obsession and fear, spectacularly out of place amid the neoclassical buildings that lined the grand boulevard. 1

American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species: Strangers on the Land by Peter Coates

adoptingmilitary trappings such as uniforms, and to defend themselves against violence. Despite some support from gun manufactur ers, such blatant adoption ofmasculine privi legeprovoked backlash, revealed especially in thepress' unflatteringand sexualized coverage of Russia's all-female Battalion of Death. Mean while, woman physicians offeredtheirservices to the military and demanded officerstatus in return.Though they failed to secure official rank, many traveledtoEurope toprovidemedi cal services to civilians, particularly women and children victimized bywartime violence. Jensen calls theirwork, which survived well into thepost-WorldWar II era, "an important part of the history of women's antiviolence activism" (p. 115). Nurses also sought officer status, not only as a means for professional advancement but also to protect themselves in a "hostile, sexu alized workplace environment" (p. 117).Their campaign reveals a shiftin theprofession and inwomen's politics; before thewar, nursing leaders insisted that nurses' professionalism and middle-class respectabilitywould shield themfrom danger, but inpetitions, letters, and organizing campaigns, nurses described con sistent "humiliations and indignities," mostly from the male doctors with whom theyserved (p. 134).They demanded officerstatus (which they failed to achieve) as protection against workplace harassment. Mobilizing Minerva's last chapter discusses the gendered dimensions of demobilization. Fearful that returning soldiers would wreak havoc onAmerican society through crime and radicalism, civic leaders,policymakers, and the popular press sought to reinforce and update theProtector-Protected script. In a foreshad owing of thepost-World War II gender order, women were "targeted as those responsible for shepherding men" into appropriate roles as workers and husbands, or "consumer civilians" (p. 153). These wartime campaigns for fuller citizenship rights in effectfailed;women did not gain equal rightsto military service,nor did Jensen'ssubjectsdevelop a theoreticalchallenge to violence against women. Their campaigns thus reveal thepersistence of gendered citizen ship despite the suffragevictory. Jensen makes impressive use of visual sources, analyzing gun advertisements, hospital layouts, posters, and photographs with care and insight, and she places her storywithin an impressively broad body of scholarship. Like scholars of women's labor activism, social reform, and African American women's orga nizing, her analysis reveals the expansiveness of the early twentieth century campaign for women's rights. Women's activists demanded not only thevote but also professional advance ment, state service, and protection from vio lence. Jensen might have paid greaterattention to the roleof race and class in these campaigns; while she addresses class differences among nurses and notes that African American women were largely excluded from these efforts,she could have more fully explored the racial and class boundaries around the Protector Protected script.Overall, though,Mobilizing Minerva is a useful analysis that contributes thoughtfullyto thehistory ofwomen, gender, war, and antiviolence activism and joins a growing body of literaturethatplaces the suf frage campaign within a much wider context of women's activism. Marisa Chappell Oregon State University AMERICANPERCEPTIONS OF IMMIGRANT AND INVASIVE SPECIES: STRANGERS ON THE LAND by Peter Coates University of California Press, Berkeley, 2006. Illustrations, photographs, notes, index. 266 pages. $39.95 cloth. Finding myself inMilwaukee last summer during the big annual Ecological Society of 302 OHQ vol. no, no. 2 America (ESA) conference, I could not help eavesdropping on several of the paper ses sions.What were all those bug collectors and flower counters (more thana thousand) talking about? Well, itwas not "ecosystem manage ment" or "ecological health" but "invasive species" that seemed tobe the main ecological buzz words. In our day, when conservationists are wondering how to stop or control those pervasive nonnative-alien-exotic creatures marching across our countryside, theoretical ecologists are askingwhat makes these plants and animals invasive, tracking the resulting ecosystemic changes, or trying to predict an alien's invasiveness. By many accounts, exotic creatures are disrupting and transforming landscapes and threateningbiodiversitywhile inflictingcostlydamages ? even compromis ing identity. But the invading exotics may occasionally confer advantages to natural and cultural systems. Ivory towers, government divisions, and grassroots organizations are now dedicating a greatdeal of energytounderstand ing and coping with a world filling up with thebiological other. Itwould seem that a little history isneeded. Peter Coates has risen to the task.While there already exist scattered chronologies of specificplants or animals brought infrom afar, which may listinformationabout arrivaldates, summaries of cultural and economic effects...

Chip-Firing And A Devil's Staircase

The devil's staircase ― a continuous function on the unit interval $[0,1]$ which is not constant, yet is locally constant on an open dense set ― is the sort of exotic creature a combinatorialist might never expect to encounter in "real life.'' We show how a devil's staircase arises from the combinatorial problem of parallel chip-firing on the complete graph. This staircase helps explain a previously observed "mode locking'' phenomenon, as well as the surprising tendency of parallel chip-firing to find periodic states of small period.