Unprecedented Forms Research Articles

Cover Picture: Organic Sol–Gel Synthesis: Solution‐Processable Microporous Organic Networks (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 49/2010)

Microporous networks of rigid organic building blocks can be solution-processed by using an organic sol–gel method. In their Communication on page 9504 ff., J.-W. Park and co-workers describe how organic molecular networks grow by the formation of stable organic sols comprising nanoparticle dispersions. This method enables processing of three-dimensional microporous molecular networks into unprecedented forms such as nanoparticles, membranes, or nanocomposites.

Lawyers’ Professionalism, Colonialism, State Formation, and National Life in Nigeria, 1900–1960: ‘The Fighting Brigade of the People’

This essay explores the role of the organized legal profession in relation to British Imperialism, state formation, and independence in Nigeria. Drawing on recent works in the fields of post-colonial legal studies and cultural histories of legal professions, the paper develops an understanding of lawyering and lawyers’ associations as deeply implicated in the myriad cultural projects through which law simultaneously ‘civilizes’ provincials and mediates between centre and locale. The paper reviews new developments in theories of legal professionalism and surveys secondary literatures of lawyers in colonial processes. It assesses the historical processes linking imperialism, law, and lawyers from the establishment of British rule in Nigeria through to independence. The causes célèbres involving the traditional authority of the Eleko of Lagos and the Emir of Kano are appraised. The two cases reveal the double-edged character of legal resistance to Imperialism, and the complex matrix of Nigeria's geo-political terrain. Simultaneously, however, they profoundly challenge Empire while constituting unprecedented forms of identity: legal rights claims, articulated within western liberalism's classic legal form, sought to secure a single Nigerian nationalism, constituting a sovereign Westphalian-style state from Nigeria's diverse and far-flung peoples.

Lawyers' Professionalism, Colonialism, State Formation and National Life in Nigeria, 1900-1960: 'The Fighting Brigade of the People'

This essay explores the role of the organized legal profession in relation to British Imperialism, state formation, and independence in Nigeria. Drawing on recent works in the fields of post-colonial legal studies and cultural histories of legal professions, the paper develops an understanding of lawyering and lawyers' associations as deeply implicated in the myriad cultural projects through which law simultaneously 'civilizes' provincials and mediates between centre and locale. The paper reviews new developments in theories of legal professionalism and surveys secondary literatures of lawyers in colonial processes. It assesses the historical processes linking imperialism, law, and lawyers from the establishment of British rule in Nigeria through to independence. The causes celebres involving the traditional authority of the Eleko of Lagos and the Emir of Kano are appraised. The two cases reveal the double-edged character of legal resistance to Imperialism, and the complex matrix of Nigeria's geo-political terrain. Lawyers profoundly challenged Empire while simultaneously constituting unprecedented forms of identity: legal rights claims, articulated within western liberalism's classic legal form, sought to secure a single Nigerian nationalism, constituting a sovereign Westphalian-style state from Nigeria's diverse and far-flung peoples.

Micro-historical settings in an anthropological venture

Violence et verites. Un royaume du Rajasthan face au pouvoir colonial . Par Denis Vidal. Paris: EHESS. 1995. 398 pp. 200 FF. ISBN 2 7132 10186. Violence and truth. A Rajasthani kingdom confronts colonial authority . By Denis Vidal. Delhi: Oxford University Press. 1997. 258 pp. Rs 450. ISBN 0 19 564 105. In this convincing and often elegant essay, Denis Vidal argues that the British colonial presence in India has not only imposed unprecedented perceptions of violence and order on Indian society, but also led to redefinitions of pre-existing forms of conflict and their reinterpretation, both at local and regional levels. To document these complex processes of interaction, the argument is based on an ethnohistorical recapturing of the little Rajasthani kingdom of Sirohi. Exploring the diverse forms of protest traditionally favoured by the different communities present within its administrative and political arena and considering each as representative of specific interests, the attempt is first to illustrate how threats of suicide and challenges of armed rebellion or mass migration constituted major traditional resources to implement the course of a social setting through a continuous flux of claims and tensions. These older modes of dissent, qualified by the colonial authorities as ‘impulsive’ and ‘criminal’, were considered mere symptoms of instability and disorder. They became modalities in the expression of discontent and the initiation of arbitration. In turn, they also became progressively discredited by those who were accustomed to resort to them when realising they could no longer induce the negotiations and debates they had opened in the past. This growing awareness caused them slowly to be replaced by different modes of protest more susceptible to be heard, and to meet the attention of the new powers they opposed, while initiating unprecedented forms of dialogue that could favour a compromising agreement to the involved parties after having, so to speak, established their divergent issues within compatible grounds of discursivity.

Literary Interiors, Cherished Things, and Feminine Subjectivity in the Gilded Age

THE SO-CALLED GILDED AGE is generally perceived as time when materialist mentality took hold of Americans--a period when their country underwent tremendous economic and social transformations that had major impact on people's lives, attitudes, and ways of self-fashioning. Indeed, the dominant narrative about the Gilded Age is, as Winfried Fluck and Leo Marx have pointed out, the one about America's historical turn towards (415). In his recent study A Sense of Things (2003), Bill Brown draws attention to the centrality of the physical object world in late nineteenth-century American culture; he speaks of an age of things, referring to an era when the invention, production, distribution, and consumption of material objects took on unprecedented forms and quantities (5). My focus here will also be on things and the relations people maintain with them, but I am less concerned with discontinuity--the narratives of new materialism--than with certain continuities. I will concentrate on the domestic, subjective, and feminine dimensions of human object-relations--relations that are embedded in and shaped by specifically gendered interiors. In this paper, interiority denotes both subjectivity and interior space, and I explore the connections between spatial, material, and psychic aspects of interiority, including the inner or secret life of things. Accordingly, it is the inside of rather than its conspicuousness that interests me here--a materialism that is intimate rather than public, moral rather than fetishistic, idiosyncratic rather than narcissistic. Concretely, I will analyze the literary life of domestic objects in two short stories, one by Sarah Orne Jewett and one by Mary Wilkins Freeman. In these writings, the domestic is the major arena of women's development, influence, and self-articulation, and it is also the realm where the relations between the genders, parents, and children, and, most significantly, people and things are mapped out. I consider the literary treatment of domestic material culture with regard to the cultural revaluation of the so-called sphere in mid-nineteenth-century America, which attributed major responsibility to women as guardians of civilization. In this tradition, the white middle-class home was closely associated with an ideal of feminine domesticity. contemporary advice literature-most prominently Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catherine Beecher's American Woman's Home (1869)--emphasized women's vital role as ministers of the family home. A Christian and moral dimension was ascribed to the tasks of housekeeping, child-rearing, and interior decoration-and woman's civilizing role was estimated accordingly. My paper sets out from the perception that this ideal domesticity does not simply encompass woman's care and love of her husband and children but also that of physical objects. Like the family, domestic things are in her charge, they are objects of her affection and devotion as well as media of feminine self-expression that articulate her aesthetic sensibility and refinement. While the association of material and psychological forms works rather harmoniously in the work of Stowe, it is rendered more complicated in the stories by Jewett and Freeman where the emotional bonds between female characters and private objects are still significant but have ceased to correspond to an ideal of feminine domesticity in an unproblematic way. Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Motherly Chair I will briefly exemplify the relevant aspects of Stowe's sentimental (see Merish) with regard to the famous chapter in Uncle Tom's Cabin entitled The Quaker Settlement.' Here, the emotional investment in things is often accompanied by an animation of the home's object world; that is, things assume lively, sometimes even human aspect. A case in point is offered by Rachel Halliday's prominent rocking chairs: There is a larger sized one, motherly and old, whose wide arms breathed hospitable invitation, seconded by the solicitation of its feather cushions,-a real comfortable, persuasive old chair, and worth, in the way of honest, homely enjoyment, dozen of your plush or brochetelle drawing-room gentry (UTC 116). …

Jamii ya wahalifu. The growth of crime in a colonial African urban centre: Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika, 1919-19611

This article contains a description of the growth of a ‘modern’ criminal culture in Dar es Salaam under British rule. It provides an analysis of the possible causes of increasing criminality in colonial Tanganyika: including urbanisation, shifting definitions of criminality arising from state intervention, the penetration of the cash nexus and economic differentiation. The growth and changing shape of property crime in the city are outlined, as are the emerging criminal networks that helped foster this phenomenon. This is followed by a discussion of the nature of those individuals engaging in crime, assessing the extent to which a ‘professional’ criminal type emerged. Neither the incidence or nature of crime in colonial Dar es Salaam were particularly grave, however, it is hoped that as an example of locally unprecedented forms of criminality emerging in a novel (colonial) socio-economic context the article will be of comparative use to historians of crime elsewhere in Africa and further afield.

Unprecedented forms of vanadium observed within the blood cells of Phallusia nigra using K-edge X-ray absorption spectroscopy

Fits to the vanadium K-edge X-ray absorption spectra (XAS) of five whole blood cell samples from the tunicate Phallusia nigra revealed unprecedented forms of intracellular vanadium. Endogenous vanadium was divided between the V(III) ion (74.2±5.1% of total V) and the vanadyl ion [V(IV)=O]2+ (25.2±5.4% of total V). The V(III) fraction included both [V(H2O)6]3+ (36.7±5.5%) modeled as VCl3 in 1 M HCl, and three previously unprecedented chelated V(III) forms (37.5±4.6%). Two of these could be represented by the model ligand environments V(acetylacetonate)3 (17.9±3.2%) and K3V(catecholate)3 (13.1±4.7%), implying DOPA-like complexation. The third chelated form was represented by the 7-coordinate N2O5 complex Na[V(edta)(H2O)] (8.0±1.8%). This coordination array, suggestive of a novel mononuclear V(III) protein site, contributed only to fits to samples 1, 2, 3 and 5, which were prepared in the presence of DTT. Endogenous V(IV) (25.2±5.4%) was principally modeled as VOCl2 in 1 M HCl. EPR spectra (averages: A‖=(1.842±0.006)×10−2 cm−1; A⊥=(0.718±0.007)×10−2 cm−1; g‖=1.936±0.002; g⊥=1.990±0.001) confirmed the predominance of the aquated vanadyl ion. Blood cell sample five uniquely required the XAS spectrum of VOSO4 in 0.1 M H2SO4 solution (13.0%) and of [OV(V)(pivalate)3] (3.1%) to successfully fit the XAS pre-edge energy region. This endogenous V(V) signal is also unprecedented. These results are compared with those of analogous fits to the blood cells of Ascidia ceratodes and may support assignment of P. nigra to a different genus.

Micro-historical settings in an anthropological venture

Violence et verites. Un royaume du Rajasthan face au pouvoir colonial. Par Denis Vidal. Paris: EHESS. 1995. 398 pp. 200 FF. ISBN 2 7132 10186.Violence and truth. A Rajasthani kingdom confronts colonial authority. By Denis Vidal. Delhi: Oxford University Press. 1997. 258 pp. Rs 450. ISBN 0 19 564 105.In this convincing and often elegant essay, Denis Vidal argues that the British colonial presence in India has not only imposed unprecedented perceptions of violence and order on Indian society, but also led to redefinitions of pre-existing forms of conflict and their reinterpretation, both at local and regional levels. To document these complex processes of interaction, the argument is based on an ethnohistorical recapturing of the little Rajasthani kingdom of Sirohi. Exploring the diverse forms of protest traditionally favoured by the different communities present within its administrative and political arena and considering each as representative of specific interests, the attempt is first to illustrate how threats of suicide and challenges of armed rebellion or mass migration constituted major traditional resources to implement the course of a social setting through a continuous flux of claims and tensions. These older modes of dissent, qualified by the colonial authorities as ‘impulsive’ and ‘criminal’, were considered mere symptoms of instability and disorder. They became modalities in the expression of discontent and the initiation of arbitration. In turn, they also became progressively discredited by those who were accustomed to resort to them when realising they could no longer induce the negotiations and debates they had opened in the past. This growing awareness caused them slowly to be replaced by different modes of protest more susceptible to be heard, and to meet the attention of the new powers they opposed, while initiating unprecedented forms of dialogue that could favour a compromising agreement to the involved parties after having, so to speak, established their divergent issues within compatible grounds of discursivity.

Porphodimethene–porphyrinogen relationship: the generation of unprecedented forms of porphyrinogen†

The electrophilic reactivity of the porphodimethene skeleton towards nucleophiles led the establishment of a synthetic methodology to unprecedented forms of porphyrinogen containing the vinylidene substituents as well as other functionalities in the meso-positions

Revitalizing the G-7

On 15-17 May 1998, the leaders of the Group of Seven economic powers (Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States), the European Union, and Russia will assemble in Birmingham, England, for their 24th annual summit. Under the energetic leadership of their host, Britains prime minister, Tony Blair, they will concentrate on the Asian economic crisis and international financial institutional reform, the once domestic challenges of employment and crime, and perhaps the prospect of a financial crisis in Ukraine and development in Africa. Russia will be confirmed as the eighth member of the club (thereby changing the G-7 into the G-8) and its president, Boris Yeltsin, will be included in all sessions except for a brief meeting of the seven to discuss hard-core economic affairs and perhaps those relating to Ukraine and Russia itself. For the first time in summit history, the retinue of attending ministers will be absent. The leaders will deliberate in an informal, retreat-like setting and take decisions that will set directions for the world as it approaches the next millennium.These innovations in agenda, membership, and format will likely do little to silence the many G-7 (and now G-8) summit sceptics. During a weekend of listening to pronouncements from this pinnacle of global power, the sceptics will find it all too easy to repeat their chronic chorus of complaints -- some of which are, of course, valid. The chorus centres on the charge that the G-7 is ineffective and irrelevant in a post-cold war, globalizing world where the international order is shaped, variously, by a dominant United States, by a G-3 of the United States, a unifying Europe, and Japan, by countries such as China and other emerging economies outside the obsolescent G-8 club, or by multinationals and markets which possess the money, wisdom, and confidence that the G-8'S cash-strapped, cowed governments lack. In this view, the fast approaching world of the millennium will make overwhelming demands on the G-8. These include the classic tasks of maintaining growth and trade liberalization in the world economy; the 1990s challenges of reform in post-cold war Russia; managing the global ecosystem; and deterring or defeating aggressors in the Persian Gulf, the Korean Peninsula, or the former Yugoslavia. To this list must be added an array of once domestic subjects which are spilling on to the international agenda; the systemic risk from the financial crisis in Asia; intense transnational processes such as crime and disease; and potential threats from expansionist powers such as the People's Republic of China. And these challenges have to be met by a group that remains nothing more than an annual gathering of politicians, devoid of the collective organizational capacity of the venerable United Nations, the expanding quasi-supranational European Union (EU), or the World Trade Organization (WTO). Moreover the sceptics will charge that the G-7 today features a lame duck American president, a Japanese prime minister immobilized by domestic economic weakness, and an unpopular German chancellor preoccupied with re-election in September. In these circumstances it will be difficult for Tony Blair to inject into the process the youthful enthusiasm that is necessary if the G-8 is to be rebranded, in substance as well as name and image, as an effective international institution ready to lead the world into the new age.Blair and his colleagues, however, could well measure up to the task and prove the critics wrong. Indeed, the Birmingham summit shows signs of marking a new beginning for the G-7 and its rebirth as an institution looked to and accepted as the centre of global governance in the new era. Its potential revitalization rests in the first instance on its record during the 1990s. As the cold war came to a peaceful end, a democratic and market-oriented order was put in place and the processes of globalization were shaped to bring unprecedented prosperity and other forms of well-being to much of the international community. …

The impact of new medical technologies in human reproduction on children's personal safety and well-being in the family.

By nature and law, parents are expected to be the guardians and protectors of their children. Yet, evidence is available that the majority of children at risk are victimized by those who should protect them: their closest family. Parenthood is a desired and valued task by individuals and soci- ety, and the new medical technologies in human reproduction assist individuals and couples to realize their wish for parenthood. Regret- fully, they also create new and unprecedented forms of risk to chil- drens’ personal safety and well-being in their family. The purpose of this paper is to show how children’s personal safety and well-being in the family are affected by the circumstances under which their conception has occurred, and that use of modern technologies in the process of human reproduction may lead to child maltreatment, abuse, neglect or abandonment. Thus, societal intervention may be necessary in order to obviate the scope of these social phenomena.