White Characters Research Articles

How the Black Guys Got to Kill All the White Guys and Still Be Good: An Essay on the Changing Dynamics of Race in American Action Cinema

There was a time, not so long ago, when a black man - a good black man - killing a white man in an action movie was tentatively accomplished. Not the killing itself, which was as bold and as marked by righteousness as the killing of bad whites by good whites. The tentativeness was, rather, both formal and narrative meaning that it was most evident in the careful unfolding of story and character within the limited universe of the film itself. Whites were changed a little, at first, becoming evil, faceless, and generic in new ways and blacks, the good blacks charged with dispatching these new bad white were, at least in the beginning, always flanked by more heroic heroes - white men - wilder men willing to kill and killing more effectively than their darker skinned counterparts. But that was only the beginning. What began as tentative within the narrative structure and characterization of action films has since exploded into a new pattern of race relations evident in, if not governing, a good many of the action films of the new millennium. Black men now are not only buddies paying second fiddle to the rampages of their white counterparts (Pfeil 1995); they are not only expendable characters sent off by whites, like a canary in a cage, to test the efficacy of unseen adversaries, nor are they merely scenery, filling up streets or starships - a silent fluid and chromatic backdrop against which the action takes place (Wallace 1995). Black men now are also, and often, heroes in their own right. They are cast as vengeful and lively characters, both likable and utterly fantastic, and they kill, as all action heroes must, with indiscretion. Who they kill is the topic of this essay, and not only who they kill, but how that killing has come to form the very ground - the necessary premise - of both their heroism and their goodness. Or to put it another way, we know them to be heroes not despite the fact that they kill white characters but because of it.

Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books by Philip Nel

Reviewed by: Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books by Philip Nel Catherine Nasara (bio) Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books, by Philip Nel. Oxford UP, 2017. The book Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books explores the covert racism that is inherent in children's literature. Philip Nel's purpose for writing the text is to examine the ways that racism endures in children's literature. He argues that because innocence is attributed to children and childhood the drive to protect young readers by shielding them from controversial or emotionally heavy topics is the prevailing attitude of adults and publishing companies. However, by forcing an innocence imperative onto children's stories, racism is able to hide in plain sight because it flourishes under the veil of good intentions that underly institutional policies and practices that, on the surface, seem rational and objective but in reality reinforce racist ideologies. Nel asserts, "The cultures of childhood play a prominent role in replicating prejudice. As Robin Bernstein has noted, 'discredited racial ideology' sneaks into children's culture under the 'cloak of innocence,' and once there, continues to seep into the culture" (4). For instance, because of the tendency to view childhood as magical and idyllic and children's stories as didactic, we remember stories according to the lessons we learned from them. We do not look beneath the surface to see how the stories are told and how in the telling of the stories subtle racism is embedded. Therefore, stories that overlook the characters' contexts reveal a lot about how the cultural imperatives of whiteness as it is wedded with neutrality provide a mechanism for readers to ignore elements that do not reflect and affirm their lived experiences. Furthermore, not only are children's books dominated by white characters and sanitized plot lines, but the sociocultural standpoint from which the stories are told is ignored. Nel situates his discussion into a historical context in order to remind readers that his exploration is a continuation of the same questions that were asked more than fifty years ago: in particular, Why is children's literature so white? In this sense, he continues Nancy Larrick's 1965 article, "The All-White World of Children's Books," wherein she examines the state of children's literature and the fact that diversity is lacking [End Page 240] in the children's publishing industry. Nel builds on Larrick's question in order to explore ways that readers can move beyond wishing and begin to change how young readers experience literature. Nel writes, "Was the Cat in the Hat Black?, then, is a book about what happens when race gets displaced, re-coded, hidden. It is about how racist ideologies persist in the literature and culture of childhood, frequently in ways that we fail to notice on a conscious level. It is about how race is present especially when it seems to be absent" (4). Nel reveals his purpose for revisiting the harmful effects of ignoring difference and silencing the voices of people from diverse backgrounds in stories. He marks the cultural narratives that evolved in reaction to recent racially motivated shootings of black teens and to the rise of racially motived hate crimes that took place after the 2016 election as a way to invoke a sense of urgency on the part of the publishing industry to become more inclusive. To that end, Nel understands that children internalize the steady stream of negative images and stereotypes about people of color put before them on a daily basis. These images are buried in their unconscious, which reinforces racist ideologies. Nel believes that helping children recognize, accept, and celebrate difference will offset the powerful effects of racism. He claims that, "If young people grow up encountering a much wider range of books, toys, movies, and video games featuring protagonists of color, then this abundance of varied representations might help to counter … all the other racist tropes embedded in the culture...

Artificial Intelligence Assisted Standard White Light Endoscopy Accurately Characters Early Colorectal Cancer: A Multicenter Diagnostic Study

Artificial Intelligence Assisted Standard White Light Endoscopy Accurately Characters Early Colorectal Cancer: A Multicenter Diagnostic Study

Flourishing in Country: An Examination of Well-Being in Australian YA Fiction

This article is the result of a collaboration between two academics—one Indigenous and one non-Indigenous—to investigate the representation of Indigeneity in two contemporary YA novels. Melissa Lucashenko's killing Darcy is narrated by multiple Indigenous and non-Indigenous characters, whereas Clare Atkins's Nona and Me is told from the perspective of a white character and explores her relationship with an Indigenous community. Cultural identity forms a significant part of well-being, and this article investigates versions of sufficient well-being. It explores how the novels represent flourishing subjects—both Indigenous and non-Indigenous—in the context of Australia as it struggles to come to terms with its colonial past and demonstrates how cognitive mapping replaces damaging colonial assumptions about Indigenous Peoples with a model of overcoming.

Jazz and Cocktails: Rethinking Race and the Sound of Film Noir by Jans B. Wager

Reviewed by: Jazz and Cocktails: Rethinking Race and the Sound of Film Noir by Jans B. Wager Eric Lott Jans B. Wager. Jazz and Cocktails: Rethinking Race and the Sound of Film Noir. Austin: U of Texas P, 2017. 163 pp. $24.95. Jans Wager works at the intersection of film soundtrack studies and racial analyses of cinema to offer an account of the way film noir deploys jazz to further its often racially fraught designs. In nine chapters that range mostly across what Wager calls “late classic film noir”—Fritz Lang’s The Blue Gardenia (1953), [End Page 340] Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success (1957), Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows (1957), Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959), and Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow (1959)—the author suggests a “revolutionary, if short-lived, element” was to be found in the contexts jazz music and its composers brought to the productions (2). The music might enhance the drama, contrast with it, or operate in and as a separate dimension altogether; it might be diegetic (seen in a club or heard on a radio) or a nondiegetic set of codes and implications; it sometimes even came in the form of key figures themselves (Duke Ellington, Chico Hamilton), or actor-avatars meant to summon them. All of it provided an air or environment of significance for “dark” tales of predominantly white characters’ having fallen into various forms of moral corruption. If I dissent below from many of Wager’s conclusions, this takes nothing away from the painstaking study and the insights into noir soundscapes ably documented in Jazz and Cocktails. Much is pinned on what Wager terms the “Afromodernism” and (after Brecht) the “alienation effect” afforded by the appearance of jazz in noir. “Afromodernism allows a reading that focuses on black activism and the use of innovation and integration to achieve artistic goals in white Hollywood. The alienation effect suggests a more general understanding of the type of disruption within established codes that jazz offered to Hollywood soundtracks” (3). Though much of the analysis strains to demonstrate such activism and disruption, what Wager most often shows comes closer to her judicious early remark on noir’s use of jazz, that it “both served the Hollywood system’s stereotypes and provided a nuanced and expanded contribution to filmic meaning, just as it meant more to the musicians themselves” (15). In my view, noir enabled a commonsense racialism by which cinematic and musical “blackness” was used to convey whiteness gone wrong, which is to say that for all the genre’s interest in exposing white pathology, deceit, murder, and betrayal, it remained problematically invested in an untainted whiteness. Before moving to her various exhibits, Wager takes us randomly for a chapter to Ogden, Utah and its Porters and Waiters Club (Wager teaches at Utah Valley University), which she demonstrates hosted many jazz musicians (even Charlie Parker) on their way to the West Coast. It’s an understatement to say this chapter doesn’t further Wager’s argument in the slightest, but it is not without its interest. Wager’s turn to Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947) mines its production details to show how conscious the studio (RKO) was of falling into various kinds of racist depiction but too ingenuously co-signs its liberal intentions, finding sequences clearly associating people of color with evil as “offering liberation and freedom” (45–46). This is the often unintentional problem of racial figuration in noir that I have argued elsewhere bedeviled whatever radical intentions this “Marxist cinema manqué ” (as Mike Davis calls it in City of Quartz) may have had—its relentless use of marginalized Black characters and racialized associations as backdrops, buttresses, and shadings for the moral degradations of white people. Wager’s book, in its sinuous explorations of such figuration, qualifies and looks for openings in it without producing a satisfying critique of it. As Wager puts it, the “representation [in Out of the Past] hints at the black activism implicit in bebop for an instant, suggests black life is as rich and sophisticated as white life for just...

Raceless No More: In Search of Race in Willard Motley's Papers

4 CLA JOURNAL Raceless No More: In Search of Race in Willard Motley’s Papers Agnieszka Tuszynska In May 1947, a new novel of urban naturalism, Knock on Any Door, appeared in the bookstores and book stands across Chicago and the nation and was soon off to a smashing success. The name of the author, Willard Motley (19091965 ), rang few bells, but that fact did not prevent sales from soaring, with 300,000 hard-cover copies selling in the year of the publication alone (Klinkowitz xviii). Many critics responded enthusiastically to the story of a sweet Italian American altar boy who transforms into a thief and eventually a killer under the pressure of poverty and violence in Chicago’s slums. Despite a few critical voices, most reviewers—including those writing for the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Magazine—lauded the novel for its psychological realism and social commentary (Fleming 59-60). Critics compared it to works by Theodore Dreiser, Richard Wright, and James T. Farrell, and were joined in singing Motley’s praises by Eleanor Roosevelt, who wrote, “Reading this book made me walk around my neighborhood with a more curious eye, and it made me wonder just what I would find if I‘knocked on any door”(Roosevelt). The novel’s success led to a film version starring Humphrey Bogart in 1949 and put the name of Willard Motley in the literary spotlight for the next couple of years. All the hype Knock on Any Door generated may seem odd to many an enthusiast of American literature who likely never heard of Motley. In fact, the author of Knock fell into obscurity just a few short years after the novel’s publication and was only temporarily and posthumously resurrected by a few academics who were the first to study his papers in the late seventies. 1 I argue that the reason for this lack of recognition lies in Motley’s status as an African American author who became defined early on as a “raceless” writer. 2 Knock, which was Motley’s first novel, places him in the ranks of other black writers, including Frank Yerby, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, and Zora Neale Hurston, who penned novels featuring nonblack protagonists and centering on non-black experience.As Gene Andrew Jarrett has argued in Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature (2007), such writers “play truant” from the school of literary racial realism that demanded that “black authors . . . write authentic literature” that portrays “the 1 The year 2019 marked the thirtieth anniversary of Northern Illinois Press University’s publication of its edition of the book, which was also the last. 2 The term “raceless” as it was originally applied to Motley by early reviewers and critics, and as it is consequently used in this essay, refers specifically to the supposed lack of focus on black experience in Motley’s writing. CLA JOURNAL 5 Raceless No More: In Search of Race in Willard Motley’s Papers black race in accurate or truthful ways” (1). To an extent, Jarrett’s study of such black literary “truancy” finds an ancestor in Claudia Tate’s reading of African American novels that resist what she calls “racial protocols” in her 1998 book, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race. Such protocols “demanded that a black text explicitly represent their lived experiences with racial oppression” (Tate 3). While Tate’s focus lies in novels that evade this racial “formula” (5) by either centering white characters or conflicts hinging on something other than racial oppression, she points out that these texts are considered marginal as opposed to “consistently venerated” works that offer “the typical racial story” (10). Jarrett makes a similar observation when he writes that black writers’ challenge to “the essentialist paradigms of ethnic authenticity . . . is marginality or exclusion in the academic and cultural marketplace” (5). Motley’s illustrative case seems to have been additionally exacerbated in that respect by the fact that he had no significant capital as an “authentically” black writer or a “race writer” before the publication of Knock. Hence, the supposed “racelessness” of his debut novel defined him and resulted in the absence...

‘I Am Also Having Mother Once, and She Is Loving Me’: Reading Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Beasts of No Nation in a Post-Network Era

AbstractThis article examines Cary Joji Fukunaga’s film adaptation of Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation, with a special focus on the final scene, in which a counsellor is assigned to help the protagonist deal with the trauma of having been a child soldier. While the casting of a black African actor as the counsellor in Fukunaga’s film may appear to detract from the novel’s interrogation of the uneven power relations between Africa and America, an interpretation oscillating between novel and film reveals that there may be some benefits to erasing the white saviour figure from the scene. The erasure of a white American character not only redirects the focus to relations among Africans but also comments indirectly on the circulation of transnational films via streaming services such as Netflix. Reading in between adapted text and adaptation also yields some important insights about Beasts’ critical engagement with the politics of circulation, reception, and consumption of child-soldier narratives at a time when such narratives have become popular among transnational audiences.

Sacrifices, Sidekicks, and Scapegoats: Black Characters and White Stories in Nora Roberts’s Romances

Abstract In several of the scores of romance novels she published between the 1980s and the early 2000s, bestselling American author Nora Roberts limns whiteness by deploying black characters as sacrifices or sidekicks. In her recent novels (2016-19), villainous white characters who express racist sentiments become scapegoats, obscuring racism’s broader structural and cultural dimensions. At a time when discrimination within romance publishing and award-giving has gained attention, it is vital to explore how the genre continues to center white readers and white identities, even while explicitly condemning racism.

Django Unbleached: The Languages of Power and Authenticity in Mainstream Film

:Though racial representation among top-billed actors in mainstream film is improving, serious Black heroes who speak African American vernacular English (AAVE) are still nearly nonexistent in these roles. Jamie Foxx's character Django from Quentin Tarantino's 2012 film Django Unchained may represent the only one in a successful, mainstream film in the twenty-first century. Unlike other characters who speak AAVE, Django is neither silly nor stupid. Tarantino expresses power through language in this character and others in the film, and Django's AAVE dialect is presented as equal in authority to the dialects of the film's white characters.

Scripting the Way for the 21st-Century Disney Princess in The Princess and the Frog

The Princess and the Frog (2009) offered Disney audiences a story unlike any other the animation pioneer had ever told: the tale of its first Black princess. Engaging scripting theory and critical whiteness studies, I analyze the portrayal of the Black character Tiana and her relationship with White character Charlotte to explain how they are framed in the context of other mediated portrayals of blackness. By attending to how Tiana’s character is primarily presented to viewers in the form of a frog, I argue that her Black body is scripted as simultaneously absent yet present, enabling audiences to accept this “new” twist to the Disney princess motif. In addition, I explain how the film gives value to its first Black princess by positioning her against a flawed White character. This reduced Tiana’s blackness. Thus, via The Princess and the Frog, Disney continued to feature whiteness as the central framework upon which Black characters may be understood and appreciated. While Disney made a paltry gesture to demonstrate that representation matters, the film also indicates that Disney’s movement toward creating a more diverse animated world has been stunted in ways that continue to influence the portrayals offered by the industry giant.

Fear and Loathing in the Americas: White Fanatics and the Cinematic Colonial Mindset

White Saviors and Magical Negros are well-established cinematic archetypes that have been identified, analyzed, and subsequently labeled as unadvisable storytelling tropes due to their innate cultural arrogance and racially offensive undertones. The following paper classifies a related cinematic phenomenon the author calls the White Fanatic. By analyzing three recent films in which white lead characters suffer existential crises and demand relief from Magical Natives, the paper makes the case that the White Fanatic represents a colonial mindset shared by filmmakers who continue to emphasize the experience of European colonizers at the expense of Indigenous peoples.The three films included in this analysis are Zama (2017), directed by Lucrecia Martel; The Lost City of Z (2016), directed by James Gray; and Embrace of the Serpent (2015), directed by Ciro Guerra. The author concludes that such stories are more sensitive to Native cultures than previously accepted versions of the White Savior. However, the essay calls for greater Indigenous representation that is uncorrupted by fanatical white protagonists.

"(Obvious now)": Forgetting How Race Works in Requiem for a Nun

"(Obvious now)":Forgetting How Race Works in Requiem for a Nun Garrett Bridger Gilmore (bio) Two recent volumes of Faulkner scholarship, Michael Gorra's monograph The Saddest Words and the edited collection Faulkner and Slavery, have relatively little to say about Requiem for a Nun. To those familiar with Faulkner studies this is likely not a surprising state of affairs, as Requiem is typically regarded as a curious dud of an attempt at narrative experimentation. Many of the extended critical accounts of the relationship between slavery, race, and Faulkner's fiction that I find most fruitful, Thadious Davis's Faulkner's Negro, Richard Godden's Fictions of Labor and An Economy of Complex Words, Edouard Glissant's Faulkner, Mississippi, and the smattering of references to Faulkner contained across Hortense Spillers's writing as collected in Black, White and In Color, likewise have little or nothing to say about Requiem for a Nun. Further complicating matters, most extended discussions of Requiem for a Nun have little to say about slavery. Noel Polk, for example, calls slavery's presence in Jefferson "ominous" without much elaboration (44). These silences strike me as odd given the fact that Requiem contains perhaps the single most comprehensive account of the political and economic history of Yoknapatawpha County and one of Faulkner's most straightforward attempts to do legibly racially liberal work by confronting and undermining, "demystifying" in Deborah Barker's account, the racist cultural trope of the Mammy in his depiction of Nancy Mannigoe (71). One might conclude from the preponderance of critical attention that Requiem is not particularly suited for thinking slavery, and therefore not fit for a certain contemporary iteration of "the work of anti-racism." In this essay I read Requiem as an anxious and regressive rewriting of the historical contradictions contained under what Hortense Spillers calls "the sign of race" previously worked through in Faulkner's earlier and more critically prominent novels (348). "'Race' alone bears no inherent meaning," Spillers writes, "even though it reifies in personality, but gains its [End Page 231] power from what it signifies by point, in what it allows to come to meaning" (380). Race points to different structures of power in Requiem for a Nun than it does in Faulkner's earlier work; what emerges, I will argue, represents an uncritical retreat into racial ideology Faulkner had previously exposed as contradictory and is therefore less analytically powerful than what had come before. I read Requiem's attempts to provide a concise history of Jefferson not as a sign of continuity with his earlier works' presentation of the meaning of slavery and race in the minds and lives of the planter class and its descendants,1 but rather as the production of new historical memory and racial self-fashioning whose pathologies are metacritically revealed in works such as Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury but whose symptoms merely appear in the first order in Requiem. If Steven Weisenburger is right that in Requiem we see Faulkner "literally in the process of retrenching, making a last stand on a radically conservative idea of individual sovereignty," this retrenchment takes form in part through a revision of the centrality of slavery to white Southern society (750). I argue that continuity across the novel's dramatic and narrative sections is forged to substantiate the Jacksonian "principle that honor must be defended whether it was or not since, defended, it was, whether or not" (Requiem 545).2 Though trafficking in Jacksonian frontier mythology in its historical construction of white Southern experience and identity, Requiem also borrows from emergent discourses of racial liberalism in its depictions of interracial cooperation and emphasis on the moral importance of individual attitudes in explaining and resolving racial conflict. The interlocking valorization of frontier sociality, of white characters' ability to accurately observe and explain racial difference, and of Nancy's apparent agency, grounds a redefinition of the South as a multiracial space of flawed individuals worthy of protection from external threats. That is, interference from national political forces. In what follows I hope to clarify several aspects of the relationship between Faulkner and "the work of anti-racism" by reading Requiem through analytical lenses for theorizing...

Musical Aspects for Empowering the Black Characters in the Movie Get Out (2017)

In this 21st century, the representation of Black people in many U.S. movies is still problematic, for the movies do not omit the stereotypical representations of Black people, which are often depicted being disrespectful and unintelligent compared to other races. Many movies have been trying to change them into another perspective, yet they are still unable to completely get rid of those stereotypes. By looking through the cinematic aspects, the dialogues, and the symbols along with the sounds and music used, this paper examines the stereotypes of Black characters the movie Get Out (2017) by Jordan Peele using discourse analysis. The paper observes that the representation of the movie still distinguishes Black from White in the aspects of body over mind in Black masculinity, incivility, and distinctive racial labor. As a result, Black characters are seen inferior compared to White characters despite the movie’s effort to empower them. The use of music also emphasizes the power relation difference between the two races. Overall finding of the paper reveals that the existence of Black stereotypical depiction is still found in a movie empowering Black people showing that race representation should be monitored thoroughly.

Scripted parallels: the paradoxical audacity of Scandal’s Papa Pope as the “Black fantastic”

ABSTRACTI theorize Rowan “Eli” Pope’s performance of Black masculinity on Scandal as a portrayal of what Iton terms the “black fantastic” (Iton, 2008. In search of the Black fantastic: Politics and popular culture in the post civil-rights era. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, p. 16). As a Black fantastic character, Rowan represents a material improvement in televised representations of Black masculinity; however, his character is theorized as paradoxical because he remains always already entrapped by the Black male as beast caricature. Although Rowan’s storylines and monologues do indeed refuse absolute foreclosure into the caricature—thereby signifying progressively deviant Black fantastic sensibilities (Iton, 2008)—ultimately his mitigated emancipation is dependent upon White male characters opposed to his own autonomy. As White male characters who lie, swindle, and murder, Fitzgerald Grant, Cyrus Beene, and Jake Ballard offer the primary assurance through scripted parallels that Rowan’s evil is not inherent to his Black masculinity. Ergo, I argue that Rowan simultaneously transforms and stagnates the television landscape by challenging and legitimizing the Black male as beast caricature. While the steadily increasing visibility of Black fantastic characters across multiple media genres is commendable, ideologically catering to Whiteness does not reflect innovative twenty-first-century television. Rather, such practices are tired and cliché—even in Shondaland.

The Portrayal of Gender and Race in Cars Trilogy

As the most commercially successful animated film, Cars trilogy, produced by Pixar Animation Studios, are opted to be analysed due to its impact on formulating perception of gender and race. Considering that intolerance and gender-based injustice still happens within our society, any discussion about gender and race portrayal, particularly through films, becomes urgent. The study aims at investigating how gender and race are portrayed in Cars trilogy. Gender portrayal is analysed through Beauvoir’s concept of immanence and transcendence and Finklea’s themes about masculinities. The portrayal of race is investigated using McLaren’s critical multiculturalism. The study uses the descriptive analytical interpretative method. The data analyzed are the characters, dialogue, and plot. The result shows that men and women are portrayed as equal but the stereotypes are still visible. Men are portrayed not only brave but also confident. Males’ romantic interest is manifested in heterosexual desire and male bosses are driven by profit. Women can be successful in racing if she dares to intervene the bureaucracy or is given opportunity by men. Different accent of English is seen as less capable and white characters are not always portrayed unproblematic.

‘Number One in the Hood, G:’ How Hip Hop Helped Adult Swim Get to the Top

This paper examines the intersection of race, Hip-Hop Culture, and animation on Adult Swim and its programs while also comparing general trends in animated content surrounding the network’s debut and subsequent success. Animation has largely been produced by white creators featuring white characters aimed mainly at a white audience. Adult Swim has expanded animation beyond the white family sitcom so often seen in popular adult animated television programs to feature groups, styles, and ideas not often seen in television, either in animation or live-action programming. Hip Hop has been hugely influential on American culture, and by exploring its impact on race in animation and the success of the network among the highly valuable 18-49 demographic, the paper aims to contribute to research concerning racial and cultural representations in the United States.

‘Injin gifts’: Interracial exchange and the image of the white avenger in frontier fiction

The essay focuses on the so called ‘Injin gifts’ – a racialist notion that James Fenimore Cooper attributed to his famous frontier hero Natty Bumppo in The Deerslayer (1841). While implying that certain traits of character, as for example vengefulness, was God’s ‘gift’ to the indigenous people, this notion also paradoxically questions the racial boundaries. The ‘gifts’ are both vertical (bestowed by God) and horizontal (liable to exchange) as Cooper’s novel demonstrates. To support this argument, the essay discusses the plot of racial violence and frontier war in the work of Cooper’s contemporaries – James Hall and Robert Montgomery Bird. Both authors introduce a new cultural hero – a white character who kills indigenous people out of revenge. While revenge is justified as an act of counter-violence, it also threatens to blur the racial boundaries since white characters put on the traits and share the spirit of their antagonists. This is especially evident in Bird’s novel Nick of the Woods (1837): Bird’s racist discourse, paradoxically and unwillingly, turns against itself as his white character Nathan Slaughter engaged in the potlatch-like exchange of violence and deaths, ‘mirrors’ the indigenous Americans he is trying to destroy.

Analyzing magnetic susceptibility of impurity doped quantum dots in presence of noise

Abstract Present investigation deals with the exploration of magnetic susceptibility ( χ ) of doped GaAs quantum dot (QD) in a noisy ambience and following the variations of a few important physical quantities. The focus being to understand the interplay between noise and those physical quantities and how the interplay happens to modulate χ . Noise invoked here is of Gaussian white character and the impurity potential is also represented by a Gaussian function. The physical parameters involve magnetic field, confinement potential, dopant location, dopant potential, noise strength, aluminium concentration (in view of Al x Ga 1 - x As alloy QD), spatially-varying effective mass, spatially-varying dielectric screening function, anisotropy, hydrostatic pressure (HP) and temperature. The study also reveals the importance of the mode through which noise may enter the system. Whereas the additive mode of application of noise fails to affect χ noticeably from a noise-free state; the multiplicative mode of applying noise does the same quite conspicuously. Moreover, in general, whereas the system exhibits diamagnetism in absence of noise and under the supervision of additive noise; it is multiplicative noise which often induces paramagnetism in the system.

Remediating Kalimán: Digital Evolutions of Eugenic Agents

Kalimán is a Mexican superhero that has circulated Orientalist eugenic values for over fifty years across Latin America. Although Indian, and wearing traditional Indian subcontinental clothing, distinguishable only by a jewel-encased “K” on his turban, Kalimán is a muscular, blue-eyed, and white character. He was created in 1963 as the main protagonist of a radio series that spawned a comic magazine in 1965, two films in 1972 and 1976, and animations and video games in the early 2010s, in a massive process of remediation that has guaranteed a solid mark in the cultural patrimony of the Americas. Since Kalimán incarnates impulses of punishment and desire over racially contaminated brown and black characters, his undisturbed, easy-to-access, and enduring presence provides evidence of deeply ingrained anti-Asian violence in Latin American popular culture, as well as the urge to develop a critical look at graphic violence traditions which continue to be treasured.

How the Green Hornet became Chinese: Cross-racial mimicry and superhero localization in Hong Kong

The Green Hornet television series (1966–67), with Bruce Lee in the role of Kato, the Green Hornet's sidekick, was broadcast in Hong Kong in 1968. In subsequent decades, characters referencing the Green Hornet emerged repeatedly in Hong Kong popular culture, and instead of being Anglo-American like the original Hornet, they have all been ethnically Chinese. Scholarship suggests that fans of color are excluded from identifying with or performing white characters based on their racialization; however, this does not appear to be the case for Hong Kong fans. I apply the concept of colonial mimicry to argue that Hong Kong fans arrived at ethnically Chinese inhabiting the Green Hornet by exploiting Kato's partial inclusion as an Asian American and as a sidekick. In addition, as a colonial audience, Hong Kong fans were well positioned to poach from a transcultural text such as The Green Hornet, and make this cross-racial move.