The pacific oyster Crassostrea gigas was experimentally exposed to the neurotoxic Alexandrium catenella and a non-producer of PSTs, Alexandrium tamarense (control algae), at concentrations corresponding to those observed during the blooming period. At fixed time intervals, from 0 to 48 h, we determined the clearance rate, the total filtered cells, the composition of the fecal ribbons, the profile of the PSP toxins and the variation of the expression of two α-amylase and triacylglecerol lipase precursor (TLP) genes through semi-quantitative RT-PCR. The results showed a significant decrease of the clearance rate of C. gigas fed with both Alexandrium species. However, from 29 to 48 h, the clearance rate and cell filtration activity increased only in oysters fed with A. tamarense. The toxin concentrations in the digestive gland rose above the sanitary threshold in less than 48 h of exposure and GTX6, a compound absent in A. catenella cells, accumulated. The α-amylase B gene expression level increased significantly in the time interval from 6 to 48 h in the digestive gland of oysters fed with A. tamarense, whereas the TLP gene transcript was significantly up-regulated in the digestive gland of oysters fed with the neurotoxic A. catenella. All together, these results suggest that the digestion capacity could be affected by PSP toxins.
This essay departs from the scholarly tradition that equates black violence with revolutionary selfhood in order to return to the rhetoric of terror that is so emblematic of Walker’s Appeal . By situating slave rebellion within an eschatological framework (and not a revolutionary one) and insisting that acts of insurrection were part of apocalyptic prophecy in which God commissions violent retribution against slaveholders, Walker attempts in the Appeal to inspire a profound sense of fear that would motivate Southern readers to take action against slavery. Indeed, fear operates as a powerful organizing sentiment in Walker’s text, and the strategic deployment of apocalyptic terror is central to the political and ethical interventions it undertakes. Surprisingly, this particular use of terror aligns Walker’s text with an unexpected tradition: sentimentality. In fact, as I will argue, the Appeal is a foundational text within a particular style of nineteenth-century sentimentality that is rooted in the evangelical fervor of the Second Great Awakening and that emphasizes fear as an essential affective dimension of moral reform. Scholars who take for granted that nineteenth-century sentimentalism is based exclusively on sympathetic love and compassion or who maintain that the nineteenth-century sentimental tradition grows solely out of the Scottish Enlightenment and as such is antagonistic to Calvinism, overlook sentimentalism’s indebtedness to early nineteenth-century Calvinist ideas. Within the nineteenth-century culture of sentiment, Calvinist warnings of apocalypse were used to accomplish many of the same reform goals that love and compassion were meant to achieve, including the inducement of sympathy, the breakdown of social hierarchies, the intensification of familial bonds, and, in the case of antislavery writing, the humanization of Negro slaves. I read Walker’s Appeal , then, as an influential prototype for later sentimental writers working within an abolitionist context whose accounts of sentimentality are as dedicated to apocalyptic fear as they are to sympathetic Christian love.
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