Master-slave Relationship Research Articles

Freedom in a Slave Society: Stories from the Antebellum South by Johanna Nicol Shields (review)

Reviewed by: Freedom in a Slave Society: Stories from the Antebellum South by Johanna Nicol Shields Christopher A. Graham (bio) Freedom in a Slave Society: Stories from the Antebellum South. By Johanna Nicol Shields. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. 337. $99.00 cloth; $79.00 ebook) Johanna Nicol Shields blends history, biography, and literary [End Page 117] analysis in this exploration of how the best-known antebellum writers from Alabama formulated their middle-class aspirations in a society dominated by patriarchy and slavery. With Freedom in a Slave Society, Shields offers a significant entry into the burgeoning literature of the once-neglected Southern middle class. Shields features the lives and work of Johnson Hooper, Joseph Baldwin, Alexander Meek, Jeremiah Clemens, Albert Pickett, Augusta Evans, William Smith, and Caroline Hentz. Some of them, like Baldwin and Evans, enjoyed literary success and national fame in their own time. Others languished in regional obscurity, even while harboring dreams of wider acknowledgment. Aside from planter Albert Pickett, the writers worked as newspaper editors, politicians, and teachers. They published regional humor, romantic fiction, history, political satire, and poetry. All thought broadly about how to interpret Alabama for a national audience. Indeed, they did not consider their state unique, except as it embodied the characteristics of a young, energetic nation. Key to these writers’ varied discussions was the ideal of self-determination— “the ability of individuals to make decisions about their lives without coercion” (p. 19). But self-determination was not selfish individualism or old-fashioned republicanism—Shields’s writers recognized that a cosmopolitan culture required personal freedom exercised in the context of social relationships predicated on volunteerism, persuasion, and supportive families. Thus, they practiced a “middle class ethical standard” (p. xix) in their own lives and placed it at the center of their literary explorations. In delineating this ethic, Shields makes a subtle and important interpretive observation, relevant and necessary to any discussion of non-planters in the South. Her writers simply accepted the fact of slavery but chose in their writings to ignore it, and ignore African Americans in their personal and professional relationships. They largely lived in the milieu of urban slavery, as Shields notes, not rural, productive slavery, and that may explain their surface ambivalence. But they prioritized other things—family, regional progress, and their careers. The religious contribution to this ethic remains unexplored [End Page 118] despite the great relevance of spirituality among the writers under consideration. Nonetheless, Shields’ interpretive contribution remains important, for nearly every theme in the historiography of the antebellum South hinges on the master-slave relationship, but these middle-class people constructed a significant cultural community without it at the center. Here is a community that was centered on the relationships between white people. As much as the writers tried to ignore slavery, however, it continued to gnaw at their consciences. Shields does fine work drawing deep meaning out of the remarkably few enslaved characters that do appear in the writers’ works. These blacks, such as Jo in Joseph Baldwin’s “The Earthquake Story,” or Harriet in Augusta Evans’s Beulah, both had an unnerving—to white Southerners—level of self-possession. But a more disturbing aspect of blacks’ presence was their effect on the white characters. As they formulated scenes of masters and other whites violently abusing blacks, these writers concluded (with the exception of Pickett) that white people ultimately lacked the self-control, reason, political trust, and sympathy necessary to maintain republican self-government, let alone a community of middle-class strivers. Even though the writers maintained different social and political positions in Alabama, Shields effectively chronicles a collective career arc from optimistic nationalism to pessimism and ambivalence. Hooper and Evans became strident Confederates, while Smith and Clemens demurred from the Southern cause, but all approached the war years with a jaundiced view of the middle-class South. As the study of the Southern middle class evolves, how these people positioned themselves in relation to the dominant cultural, social, and political elements of Southern society will be a central inquiry. Shields offers an excellent example of how that inquiry may be conducted. [End Page 119] Christopher A. Graham Christopher A. Graham is a...

Emulating a Portuguese Model

This article presents a new perspective on the master-slave relationship in New Netherland in order to complement the existing theories on the treatment of slaves in that Dutch colony. It shows how prior to the loss of Dutch Brazil, the West India Company modeled its slave policy after Portuguese practices, such as the formation of black militias and the use of Christianity as a means to foster slave loyalty. It also points out that in the initial slave policy of the Dutch Reformed Church was characterized by the ambition to replace the Iberian Catholic Church in the Americas. While the Reformed Church in the early decades of the Dutch colonial expansion was characterized by a community-building spirit and a flexible attitude toward newcomers, the loss of Brazil shattered the dream of a Protestant American continent and gave way to a more exclusivist approach with a much stronger emphasis on orthodoxy. This led to a dramatic change in attitude vis-à-vis slaves, which is reflected in the segregationist policies―both at a social and a religious level―in later Dutch slave colonies such as Suriname.

“Her Little Maid Mandy”: The Abolitionist Slave Owner and the Rhetoric of Affection in the Life and Early Fiction of E. D. E. N. Southworth

This essay explores newly discovered evidence that novelist E.D.E.N Southworth, whose career began as a contributor to the anti-slavery National Era , was a slave-owner during the years she was publishing abolitionist fiction in the Era . The awareness of this status both complicates and clarifies our understanding of Southworth's early fiction, which has been labeled both abolitionist and pro-slavery apologism. The essay explores Southworth's vacillating thinking on slave-owning and recovers her predilection for an affectionate view of the master-slave relationship even as her fiction demonstrates the danger of this view. The concluding section of the essay explores evidence, emerging from an 1854 public dispute between Southworth over the ownership of a slave, that Southworth learned the lesson of her own fiction as she set aside sentimental views of slave-owning and manumitted her slaves.

Robotic surgery in ureteral reconstruction.

Urology has traditionally been a technically driven specialty. Minimally invasive surgical procedures aim to reduce collateral surgical damage while optimizing functional and oncological results. Improvement of magnification, 3D imaging, articulated instruments, depth perception, and precise motor control are prerequisites to achieve these goals. Robotic technology has overcome most of these potential limitations and presently allows challenging laparoscopic interventions, not only in a few experts’ hands but also among a broad spectrum of urologists and patients who can benefit. Robot–assisted surgery presently operates on a “master-slave relationship basis,” and the primary system is the Da Vinci robot (Intuitive Surgical, Sunnyvale, Calif.). Urology is the leading field in robotic surgery, with radical prostatectomy being the most often performed robotic–assisted intervention. The paper by Sim et al. [1] presents a new unique experience using minimally invasive techniques for ureteral surgery in patients with long or multiple ureteric strictures. The technique described in the paper showed excellent results and looks very promising. Available publications concerning this topic are limited to the description of a distal ureteral reimplantation case series. In this context, the current article has a great impact for reconstructive urology. Presently, in spite of increasing popularity of minimally invasive pelvic surgery, such as laparoscopy and robotics, iatrogenic ureteric injury is still present. Moreover, this complication may also take place during ureteroscopy. The distal part of the ureter is the most commonly injured place due to its anatomical location. In the majority of cases, the ureter is injured during attempts to ligate branches of the internal iliac vessels, and the injured ureter may have an even more tenuous blood supply than usual after these maneuvers. Impaired ureteral patency is a serious condition in which the majority of cases requires ureteral reconstruction to restore normal renal drainage. Depending on the type, timing and location of the ureteral injury, surgery options include removal of the ligature to perform ureterocystoneoanastomosis or scrappy plastic fragment ureter bladder [2]. No doubt the length of the ureteral injury plays an important role for the determination of the most appropriate procedure for ureteral reconstruction. In fact, reimplantation by ureterocystotomy is usually indicated for short defects of 4 to 5 cm in the distal part of ureter, while larger defects need either the psoas hitch and/or Boari flap. Ureteral lesions between 6 and 10 cm could be bridged by a psoas hitch, while longer lesions of up to 15 cm can be treated by the additional performance of a Boari flap [3]. As the blood supply of the damaged distal ureteral segment may be disrupted, ureteroneocystostomy is an ideal option for distal ureteral repair [4]. However, we are often unable to perform this technique due to the complicated dissection and isolation of the isthmic ureter due to adhesions, urine of blood collection in abdominal or retroperitoneal cavities. The need for adequate exposure of the lesion and the subsequent management of the involved structures results in a large abdominal incision. The latter is associated with significant morbidity [3]. The majority of the papers devoted to reconstructive surgery of the upper urinary tract with the use of the da Vinci system are limited to case reports. Megan O. Schimpf et al, demonstrated a series of 11 patients with iatrogenic injury of the distal ureter who were treated with robotic ureteroneocystostomy both for isolated iatrogenic distal ureter and in combination with ureteral stricture due to different reasons, such as ureteral cancer [5]. Patil NN with colleagues presented an experience in treating 12 patients with robotic ureteral reimplantation in various medical centers [6]. A recently published report by Musch M et al., describes the largest series of 16 patients who underwent a variety of robot–assisted reconstructive surgeries on the distal third of the ureter. Among them, 6 operations were performed by the Boari technique [3]. In the Urology clinic of Moscow State University of Medicine and Dentistry, a robotic program was started in 2008 [7] and has also great deal with reconstructive surgery of the upper urinary tract due to iatrogenic injury. Robotic surgery seems to have its greatest benefit in procedures requiring fine operative movements, where range of motion is limited, and where visibility is impeded [8]. In our opinion, due to “gentle” dissection, precision stitching in necessary structures, minimum traction and displacement of surrounding organs and tissues, this approach allows for easy access to the exact point of the urethral lesion and implementing the direct ureterocystoneoanastomosis. That could be a strong alternative to traditional laparoscopic and open techniques [9]. Future prospective comparative controlled studies are needed.

Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America by Jennifer Anderson (review)

Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America By Jennifer Anderson. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. Pp. 398. Cloth, $35.00.)This is a thoughtful, well-researched, and beautifully written study. It is not mere commodity history and will surely appear on graduate read- ing lists. Anderson's examination of Caribbean environmental history fits into the growing body of literature on forestry and empire. As social history of Anglophone Caribbean labor it complements standard histor- ies of sugar slavery. And as cultural history of the American consumption revolutions, it thoughtfully probes the fluid relationship between high and middling tastes as American society urbanized and industrialized in the nineteenth century.Anderson first considers the emergence of mahogany as a symbol of eighteenth-century refinement and high-culture polish. Mahogany was indeed a status symbol, so much so that angry mobs attacked mahogany furnishings hoping to take their human targets down a peg, whether those targets were Loyalists in the 1770s or free blacks in later decades. Next, the author considers the harvesting of mahogany, often a byproduct of sugar cultivation, on Jamaica. Mahogany trees were stores of value felled by planters in bad sugar years and a living for traveling woodcutters who pursued the tree into the undeveloped uplands.Bermuda, the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, and the Ceded Islands receive excellent treatment. Their inclusion is a model for a more holistic approach to the British Empire. Anderson connects Jamaican and Bay of Hondouras (present-day Belize) mahogany as waves in the same phenomenon. In the Bay, slaves with knowledge of mahogany locations had, as the Jamaican woodcutters did, considerable agency. The master-slave relationship remained continuously up for negotiation-as it seemed was Britain's very presence on the Central American coast.We learn, too, that North American merchants peddled British Caribbean mahogany across the Atlantic as part of their traffic in rum, sugar, slaves, and sundry. After U.S. independence, mahogany from the French and Spanish Caribbean, a newly specialized timber distribution system within the United States, and the adoption of mahogany veneers (thin layers of mahogany laid over a cheaper wood), made mahogany furnishings more accessible to American buyers even as the tree became rarer in the wild.Eighteenth-century British attempts to propagate mahogany were checkered. The massive tree took centuries to reach full size: not a time scale in which humans can measure financial profit and loss well (and perhaps not even ecological loss). Nevertheless, as veneers came into wider use, full-size trees were no longer necessary. Profit and an infant interest in forestry coalesced around trees expected to grow a few decades before harvesting. Both Honduran and West Indian varieties of mahogany were transplanted within the Caribbean in the late eighteenth century. Mahogany was subsequently propagated globally, but rarely without destructive borers far behind. Anderson reminds us that in the case of mahogany man could not always unlock nature's secrets (249).In Jacksonian and antebellum America, steam power allowed a more thorough exploitation of mahogany wood: Steam-cut veneers were thinner, and railroads allowed lumber to be more thoroughly extracted from forests. The illusion of abundance continued even as the resource dwindled further. And it was indeed sometimes an illusion: Poor workmanship and materials became an increasing problem with thin veneers. The well off had solid wood and the masses their veneers, but veneers were sometimes suspect. …

Petri nets with name creation for transient secure association

Transient secure association has been widely accepted as a possible alternative to traditional authentication in the context of Ubiquitous Computing. Two components in a distributed system with transient secure association may share a master-slave relationship, which creates a hierarchical but dynamic structure of components. In this paper we develop several formal models for distributed systems with transient secure association, with incremental expressive power, all based on Petri nets. The first model, that we call transient secure association (TSA) systems, considers finitely many components. Then we consider a small extension of TSA systems, in which slaves are initialized whenever a master-slave relation is broken. Last, we define unbounded TSA (uTSA) systems, for which the number of components is not bounded. For each of the defined formalisms, we establish a link to a known class of Petri nets, thus inheriting the corresponding (un)decidability results from them.

HUMAN ROBOTICS INTERACTION WITH DATA MINING TECHNIQUES

Human-robotics interactions generally consist of transfer of information from the humans to the robotics by using various algorithms, scientific tools and techniques. In this research paper human queries and tasks can be handled by human robotics and for the communication with the server-systems robotics acts as an interface. Human queries can be easily recognized with the help of data mining techniques. These Queries can be handled into three different parts. (a)Input device-used to collect the data (b) Human Robotics-act as an interface (c) Server System-used to process data. In the absence of interface interactions between the human and server system will not be possible. Here we are uses three types of data mining techniques like Classification, regression analysis and time series analysis. Each technique uses a separate type of data to perform mining task. The special focus of this paper is human and robotics follows master-slave relationship and ultimately humans successfully collaborate to achieve a joint action.

A botnet-based command and control approach relying on swarm intelligence

Survivability and scalability are the main emerging challenges in command and control of ubiquitous networked entities operating in untrusted communication scenarios, due to the increasing sophistication of the detection and mitigation/defeating techniques together with the increasing number of elements to be controlled and their distribution over multiple heterogeneous communication infrastructures. Accordingly, this work focuses on a new more robust and scalable botnet-based command and control architecture, aiming at wiping off any rigid master-slave relationship and autonomizing the bot operating roles, with significant agility gains in the whole overlay communication infrastructure. It relies on swarm intelligence and in particular on stigmergic communication, ensuring spontaneous, implicit coordination and collaboration among the independent bot agents. The resulting architecture presents improved fault tolerance and dynamic adaptation to varying network conditions, by propagating control messages to any bot node through multiple short-range hops structured according to a dynamically built Degree Constrained Minimum Spanning Tree, whose distributed calculation is inspired to ant colony's foraging behavior. For this reason, it may constitute the basis for an evolutionary malware-based control and management scheme that can be used in several homeland security/defense scenarios where the botnet technology may be used as a support tool in strategic military or intelligence operations.

Till Death Do Us Part: Testamentary Manumission in Seventeenth-Century Lima, Peru

This article joins a long-standing conversation among slavery scholars regarding the tensions that emerged from the legal status of slaves as property and as persons. This feature of quasi-personhood and property was perhaps most pronounced in the testamentary devise of freedom granted by slave owners. Posthumous bequests of freedom simultaneously recognised the property rights of the deceased in human beings, while validating the affective ties of loyalty and devotion spawned by the master–slave relationship. The article traces the efforts of Margarita de Torres, an enslaved woman, who waged a nine-year lawsuit for her freedom against the executrices of her owner's estate. In so doing, the article analyses Margarita's motivations for embarking on a protracted and costly lawsuit, given the odds in favour of, and against, slaves seeking to enforce testamentary promises of manumission in seventeenth-century Lima. More broadly, the article explores the affective relationships between owners and slaves, the conditions that accompanied testamentary freedom and the complexities that arose with the legal treatment of enslaved offspring of free fathers.

Introduction

Introduction

Other Atlantics:

Other Atlantics:

Islamic banking in Pakistan: Fiqa-e-Jaferia offers optimization

Islamic banking is an initiative of State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) and Shariah scholars for purifying the financial and economic system of Pakistan from interest (Riba). The framework of Islamic banking guides banks to customize their policies and product mix in conformance with Shariah standards. Despite targeting a noble cause of eliminating interest (Riba) from the economy of Pakistan, the existing practices of Islamic banks and certain aspects of the framework of Islamic banking face logical objections. Due to inappropriate operational measures, Islamic banks are yet criticized for not having embraced Islam completely. Islamic banks are found adopting Islam in parts and chunks. Islamic banks are epitomized by certain sect instead of Islam and further, they are not imbued to alleviate poverty from mass root level being mere commercial enterprises. Fiqa-e-Jaferia explains Islam based on the Holy Quran and teachings of Prophet Muhammad (SAAW) explained by Imams in his Ahl-e-Bait (AS). By now, the Islamic banking framework and Islamic banks are not benefited by the input and support of Fiqa-e-Jaferia. The study discovered that the aforementioned objections on Islamic banking can be rectified through incorporating guidance of Fiqa-e-Jaferia. In January 2008, this study joined an Islamic bank that was functioning as per Fiqa-e-Hanafi to observe and experience the norms and practices in Islamic banks. It investigated and interpreted the root cause of short comings in Islamic banking rendering it objectionable. Since January 2008 to date, the study compared the two major fiqas that are Fiqa-e-Jaferia and Fiqa-e-Hanafi with the intention of contributing a consensus on Islamic banking for strengthening this noble cause. In the light of Fiqa-e-Jaferia, the study has identified Kibor Halal for SBP and number of opportunities for SBP, Islamic banks and stakeholders for optimizing the framework and practices of Islamic banking. The study recommends a solution to resolve all objections on Islamic banks and Islamizing the entire banking industry within three steps. It recommends engaging SBP, banks and their clients in a double tier master slave relationship such as Slave 1 (bank) – Master (SBP) – Slave 2 (client) to get the entire banking functions Halal with a little modification in the mechanism of banking. It invites divergent Muslim scholars and SBP to reach a consensus considering Islamic banking as a national cause instead of keeping it as a mere commercial movement. It offers opportunities for further research, development and unity among divergent sects to strengthen both Islamic banking and Pakistan. The ultimate milestone is recommended to be an Islamic financial system seeking interest free economy, implementing real spirit of Islamic financial culture shielded from capitalistic and satanic intentions and norms.

The extended resource task network: a framework for the combined scheduling of batch processes and CHP plants

The issue of energy has emerged as one of the greatest challenges facing mankind. In an industrial perspective, the development of site utility systems (generally combined heat and power (CHP) systems) for the generation and management of utilities provides a great potential source for energy savings. However, in most industrial sites, a master–slave relationship usually governs this kind of system and limits the potential operating capacity of CHP. To improve the decision-making process, Agha et al. (2010. Integrated production and utility system approach for optimising industrial unit operation. Energy, 35, 611–627) have proposed an integrated approach that carries out simultaneous and consistent scheduling of batch production plants and site utility systems. The modelling of the problem relies on a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation. Nevertheless, although it is a powerful mathematical tool, it still remains difficult to use for non-expert engineers. In this framework, a graphical formalism based on existing representations (STN, RTN) has been developed: the extended resource task network (ERTN). Combined with an efficient and generic MILP formulation, it permits various kinds of industrial problems, including production and consumption of utility flows to be modelled homogenously. This paper focuses on the semantic elements of the ERTN formalism and illustrates their use through representative examples.

From Haiti to Mississippi: Faulkner and the making of the Southern master-class

William Faulkner had a real, if oblique, relationship to Haiti as a place whose tortured history helped shape the history of the US South. This article examines the way Faulkner's work exemplifies the literary modernism of the interwar years and also put it alongside the explosion of cultural creativity in the Black Atlantic in that same period. In fact, Faulkner's work belongs to the literary history of the Black Atlantic. This study traces the importance of Haiti in the life-story of the central figure in Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Thomas Sutpen, a white slave owner in Mississippi between the 1830s and Reconstruction. Absalom tells the story of how a white master was made out of a young man of poor white origins rather than being descended from Virginian or European aristocracy. The article also explores the ways Hegel's paradigm of domination, the master-slave relationship, is reproduced in, and helps illuminate, Sutpen's story. Thus the Hegelian analysis explains not only how slaves, but also how masters, are produced.

Complexity, Change, and the Historiography of the Old South

Complexity, Change, and the Historiography of the Old South Matthew Mason (bio) Loren Schweninger , ed. The Southern Debate over Slavery, vol. 2: Petitions to Southern County Courts, 1775-1867. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008. xviii + 424 pp. Abbreviations, glossary, bibliography, and index. $60.00 Lacy K. Ford . Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2009. viii + 688 pp. Abbreviations, notes, and index. $34.95. While these two volumes differ in nature, they both reinforce the growing emphasis on complexity in the historiography of the Old South. Along with much other scholarship in recent decades, they challenge the view, whether in antebellum proslavery treatises or twentieth-century history, of the Old South as a stable, monolithically proslavery, agrarian order. Both at the level of ideas and politics in Ford's extended monograph, or in the ground-level conflicts highlighted by Schweninger's edition of court documents, readers will catch a view of a slave South that was far from simple or unchanging. Both books also center around Southerners speaking to other Southerners, which imposes some limits—especially on Ford's analysis—but has the virtue of stripping away the polemical glosses in which defenders of the slave South wrapped their message to the outside world. The 180 petitions in Schweninger's edition (out of more than 14,500 gathered for the larger project, on microfilm) were the product of a wide array of types of cases, and thus they touch on slavery in a variety of ways. But the petitioners are all bent not on bolstering an external defense of slavery, but rather on winning their respective cases. This lends weight to Schweninger's argument that these documents not only "provide direct, firsthand accounts about specific events," but do so "with remarkable candor" not exceeded by any other kind of source (pp. 3-4). Because the slaveholding petitioners spoke so directly and unequivocally in cases concerning the property value of their slaves, "the petitions reveal, in stark and graphic ways, what it meant for the slave-owning class to possess people as property" (p. 12). These sources thus [End Page 61] confirm the growing historiographical emphasis on the aspects of American slavery that treated African Americans primarily as fungible assets. And those masters whose petitions spoke frankly of freedom as the ultimate reward for faithful slaves, and otherwise expressed qualms as to the justice of slavery (see, for example, pp. 98 and 134), bolster the interpretations of scholars—including Ford—who dwell on Southern whites' tortured ambivalence about Southern bondage rather than on the unyielding logic of "positive-good" theoreticians. But the parts of Schweninger's introduction emphasizing the variegated within Southern slave society are themselves in tension with other interpretations he advances and, to my mind, with some of the documents themselves. The petitions for divorce from white slaveholding women, he argues, "reveal the harsh realities of plantation life, providing details" of tyrannical husbands and masters, details often "excluded from diaries, letters, recollections, and many other sources." The world they "reveal" to the courts is one of "adultery, interracial sex, alcoholism, violence, brutality, abandonment, incest, and insanity" far in excess of non-slaveholding societies (p. 6; see also 27-28). On the strength of these and other types of petitions, Schweninger also dismisses the work of "some historians" who have portrayed the master-slave relationship as one involving negotiation and compromise. "Petitions," he states directly, "provide very little evidence that such was the case" and much evidence of "the savage nature of human bondage" (p. 9). And if the petitions depict masters as brutal despots, they depict slaves as engaged in "a constant struggle" for their freedom (p. 10). The documents following the editor's introduction give the reader no reason to question this characterization of the frightful world they reveal. The question is how representative the documents are. The fact that these are legal documents would seem to mean that they would represent, by their very nature, the extremes of both masters and slaves. The less brutal slave drivers among the whites, and the less committed freedom fighters among the blacks, would be exponentially less likely to...

Sex, Dialectics and the Misery ofHappiness

This paper offers a reading of Todd Solondz Happiness (1998) in relation to Lacan’s notion of sexual difference. It argues that both the film and theorist present a ‘logic’ of sexuality and sexual difference which seems to owe much to Hegel’s master-slave dialectic but that in the end owes more to Kojeve’s (mis)reading than to Hegel himself. It outlines the usefulness of an expanded notion of the dialectic to understand sexual difference through the inclusion of the Hegelian figures of the stoic, the sceptic and the unhappy consciousness. It also suggest that the priority of identity and non-identity to dialectic logic has been obscured by this focus on the master-slave relationship and that an analysis of the role of the autoerotic develops modes of sexual similarity and difference that cuts across heteronormative gender lines. The anxiety both Lacan and the film seem to suffer with regard to autoerotic is then used to critique their sexual conservatism and their prescriptive rather than descriptive representation of sexual relationships.

Waiting for Godot (review)

Reviewed by: Waiting for Godot Michael Y. Bennett Waiting for Godot. By Samuel Beckett. Directed by Anthony Page. Roundabout Theatre Company, Studio 54, New York City. 11 April 2009. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot has had two labels firmly placed upon it: absurd and existential. But this particular production of the play raised two key questions: How can existentialism be so funny? How can seeming despair leave one in such a good mood? Anthony Page’s Waiting for Godot made every attempt to obliterate the existential and absurd overtones normally associated with the play. In other words, in this production, the play was neither an existential cry from the abyss nor a meditation on despair, any hint of which was removed by peels of laughter. Philosophy was no consolation; consolation took the form of diversion, especially with friends. Page removed the tragic from the tragicomedy through casting, staging, and by emphasizing Estragon’s joyful pronouncements over Vladimir’s forlorn comments. The comic components not only undermined the existential and absurd elements often read into this play, but also changed the dynamics between Estragon and Vladimir: Vladimir was not the wise philosopher who guided the two; instead, it was Estragon’s joy and fun-loving nature that kept them going. Click for larger view View full resolution Roundabout Theatre Company’s Waiting for Godot. (Photo: Joan Marcus.) The casting of three prominent comedians—Nathan Lane, John Goodman, and Bill Irwin—pushed Page’s production in the direction of comedy. Nathan Lane played Nathan Lane reading Estragon; in other words, as is typical of much of Lane’s work, he acted Estragon as a lovable, loud buffoon, whose physical gestures and movement were demonstrative and sure. John Goodman portrayed Pozzo as a bigger-than-life, bloated robber baron; with a quasi-British accent, Goodman’s voice pierced the stage with a self-amused grandiloquence. Bill Irwin’s Vladimir was stuttering and uncertain. His philosophical utterances were meek and unsure, his accompanying gestures and movements equally hesitant. John Glover played Lucky as a skeleton of a man, wheezing and stumbling about the stage, except when he came to life in his grand monologue. The effect of these interpretations was to change the dynamics of the characters. Whereas scholars commonly read Estragon as semi-dependent on the wiser, philosophical Vladimir, Estragon’s joy of life and folly seemed to comfort Vladimir, whose voice shook, when philosophy failed to provide him with unshakable answers. Physical humor and slapstick comedy triumphed in the end for both Vladimir and Estragon, as the audience’s hysterical laughter punctuated the performance. Furthermore, Pozzo’s booming voice was echoed in Estragon’s loud outbursts, which seemed to situate Estragon as master to Vladimir, a mirror of Pozzo’s master–slave relationship with Lucky. The crucial line in this production was not “nothing to be done,” as this line was often mumbled and understated, but Lucky’s repeated, energetically delivered, “and I resume.” The greatest moments of joy and audience laughter were a ruckus dance (“how time flies when one is having fun”) and the normally tongue-in-cheek, but this time [End Page 110] joyfully serious, “that passed the time” after Pozzo and Lucky left. The opportunistic line, “a diversion comes along, let it not go to waste,” apparently exemplified the performance’s thematic thrust. Do not miss an opportunity to laugh, Page seemed to say—and the audience did not. The staging offered the final key interpretation. The stage directions read, “A country road. A tree.” In this production, however, the country road ran through a bowl-shaped mountainous pass. Surrounded by rocks, Estragon and Vladimir could not get lost in an endless expanse. Their friendship felt like a fortress, a impression highlighted in the last moments when the mood turned somber and, bathed in a spotlight, Estragon and Vladimir stood side by side, motionless. Then Estragon, the stronger of the two, reached out to Vladimir and held his hand for comfort. But we laughed not at the characters. The audience did not experience schadenfreude; rather we laughed at the lovable interaction of complicated relationships. Think of Lucy and Desi, Abbot and Costello, and the Odd Couple, among...

Enemies and familiars: slavery and mastery in fifteenth-century Valencia

A prominent Mediterranean port located near Islamic territories, the city of Valencia in the late fifteenth century boasted a slave population of pronounced religious and ethnic diversity: captive Moors and penally enslaved Mudejars, Greeks, Tartars, Russians, Circassians, and a growing population of black Africans. By the end of the fifteenth century, black Africans comprised as much as 40 percent of the slave population of Valencia. Whereas previous historians of medieval slavery have focused their efforts on defining the legal status of slaves, documenting the vagaries of the Mediterranean slave trade, or examining slavery within the context of Muslim-Christian relations, Debra Blumenthal explores the social and human dimensions of slavery in this religiously and ethnically pluralistic society. Enemies and Familiars traces the varied experiences of Muslim, Eastern, and black African slaves from capture to freedom. After describing how men, women, and children were enslaved and brought to the Valencian marketplace, this book examines the substance of slaves' daily lives: how they were sold and who bought them; the positions ascribed to them within the household hierarchy; the sorts of labor they performed; and the ways in which some reclaimed their freedom. Scrutinizing a wide array of archival sources (including wills, contracts, as well as hundreds of civil and criminal court cases), Blumenthal investigates what it meant to be a slave and what it meant to be a master at a critical moment of transition. Arguing that the dynamics of the master-slave relationship both reflected and determined contemporary opinions regarding religious, ethnic, and gender differences, Blumenthal's close study of the day-to-day interactions between masters and their slaves not only reveals that slavery played a central role in identity formation in late medieval Iberia but also offers clues to the development of racialized slavery in the early modern Atlantic world.

Why Human Rights Fail to Protect Undocumented Migrants

In this article, I depart from the factual difficulties of undocumented migrants to access a state’s protection mechanisms for avowedly universal human rights. I relate this aporia to two competing conceptions of territorial jurisdictions. Drawing on the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Migrant Workers Convention, I separate the sphere of the political community (the polis) and that of the household (the oikos) in developing a political theory of undocumented migration. It rests on two central tenets: one is a tributary transaction between sending state and host state, in the course of which the undocumented migrant worker is offered without conditions attaching, yet with the hope of remittances flowing in return. This offering relates to the oikos, which makes available a limited degree of protection under labour law. The second is a contractual form of submission by the undocumented migrant worker, which is structurally analogous to the master-slave relationship developed in Hobbes’ defense of war slavery. This is related to the polis, which denies all meaningful political activity to the undocumented migrant (as reflected in the denied right to found labour unions). Finally, drawing on Werner Hamacher’s work, I analyse how human rights are intrinsically related to a position of privacy, which escalates into a form of isolation under the structures producing undocumented migrants.

Perspective on Fair Value Measurement

Although fair value is not a new measurement attribute, the interest of discussing fair value has been aroused by the release of new accounting standards. This article decodes fair value measurement again from four aspects respectively. Fair value measurement attribute is for asset measurement in the end, a kind of initiative measurement from master-slave relationship. As a matter of fact, fair value measurement is a measurement process. However, considering the special time, the relationship of exclusiveness does not exist between fair value and other measurement attributes. Simultaneously, fair value refers to fairness of value in special time and it is meaningless for fair value without the concept of time.