Different features of the liinnology of Tomahawk Lagoon, a shallow, hypertrophic Xew Zealand lake were studied for varying periods between 19134 and 1986. Surveys in 10 years revealed a strong positive correlation between tho winter black swan population and the biomass of macrophytes which in turn in a shorter study was invcrsely related to the abundance of phytoplankton. A regression model was developed relating the wintcr maximum swan population to phytoplankton productivity in the previous summer. Tlic modcl wockccl well for another very shallow lake, but less wcll for a third lake with a mean dcpth greatcr than the feeding reach of swans.S o general mechanism could be established for suppression of phytoplankton when macrophytes were abundant, though the effcct was large. Soppression of macrophytes in other years is attribute d to shading by phytoplankton. The decline of one algal bloom was related t o nitrogen deficiency followed by intense zooplankton grazing. Another was ended b y t h e optical effects of a large floodborne silt inflow and flushing of phytoplankton. Einpirical models relating chlorophyll a t o phosphorus or nitrogen, and zooplankton biomass to chlorophyll u or phosphorus do not work well for this lake, and the general problems of modelling shallow highly eutrophic lakes arc discussed.
This essay argues that Dalit autobiographies must be treated as testimonio, atrocity narratives that document trauma and strategies of survival. Using Bama’s Karukku as a case-study, it explores the shift between the generic conventions of individual life-writing and collective biography in this text. It analyses the strategy of witnessing in Bama’s narrative, arguing that she functions as a witness to a community’s suffering, and calls upon readers to undertake “rhetorical listening” as secondary witnesses. This act of recording trauma and witnessing, the essay proposes, is one of subaltern agency.
Posthumanism is a mode of thinking about the intersecting human, nonhuman, and technological worlds that has gained theoretical currency in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, especially in the wake of ecological consciousness and environmental campaigns that call into question the role of humans in shaping the fate of the Earth. The interconnectedness of humans with other life forms and the planet has been a commonplace in Asian, African, and Aboriginal thought as embodied in Yoruba, the subcontinent’s tribal myths, folklore, creation stories of the Native Americans, and literatures from these continents. Posthumanism as a school of theory in the West draws on a Eurocentric tradition of humanism and its critique—some of which emerges from critical race theory—and disciplines as diverse as animal studies and social studies of technology. Euro-American posthumanism calls for a reevaluation of traditional humanistic myths, such as the human as the center of the universe, or the instrumental attitude toward other life forms and nonliving matter. A contribution of posthumanist thought has been to decenter the human and to demonstrate how all matter is interlinked, mutually dependent and co-evolved, whether this is the animal forms on Earth or the impact humans have on technology and vice versa. Gender, sexuality and social relations, and families and communities have all been reconfigured through the arrival and incorporation of technology. Posthumanism demolishes the Nature/Culture binary as it has been enshrined in the Euro-American tradition. Technologies and humans, it argues, co-evolve, just as humans and nonhumans do. It also examines the prospects of human enhancement, the expansion of artificial intelligence (AI), and the ethics of these developments as they affect humans, the law, concepts of “personhood,” and the social order. Popular culture, performance arts, and even architectural styles have been known to incorporate posthuman themes. Popular culture, in particular, has made cyborgs, chimeras, human-animal hybrids, and techno-dystopias—dwelling on rampaging artificial intelligence and cyborgs, usually—a commonplace motif. Finally, posthumanist thought treats animals and plants as companion species to humans, and numerous studies now explore “vegetal thinking,” animality, and the entanglements of humans with other life forms as well as nonliving matter. More recent work in posthumanism and the fiction of NK Jemisin and others seeks to link race in history with the history of particular practices that dehumanized humans (such as colonialism and slavery). Introducing race into the debate when speaking of, say, the Anthropocene or technology enables a provincializing of posthumanism.
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