Publication Type: Abstract Proposal
Abstract: In a paper given at last year's ARCE annual meeting, I wished to demonstrate that the numerous references to snw nsw 'Kings' brothers' in major kushite sources signaled the emergence of a new pattern of royal succession under 8th Century B.C. 25th Kushite kings in Egypt and their descendents, the rulers of the independent Kingdom of Napata, a territory that covered more or less present-day Sudan from the 7th Century to the 2nd Century B.C. The main purpose of my paper was to show that an important political and religious ideological shift had occurred. Whereas the fratrilineal succession, during the 13th dynasty and at other times in pharaonic history, was seen as exceptions to the rule, the advent of the Kushite dynasties did necessitate thorough structural changes in both royal phraseology and mythology.
This year, through the examination of a major kushite document (Cairo Stela JE 48866), known as the Enthronement inscription of the Napatan king Aspalta (6th century B.C.), I would like to put forward another particular feature that illustrates the way Nubia, a society of oral tradition, was able to re-appropriate the written heritage of Pharaonic Egypt in order to suit its own particular needs. More specifically, a new translation of a passage in the Stela is ground for a reassessment of the role played by the Egyptian god Ra in choosing rulers in Ancient Kush. Not only does the text stress the predominance of a local solar Nubian god (Amen-Ra of Napata) over an Egyptian one, it also shows, in a subtle and implicit way, the renunciation of the traditionally important role played by the Heliopolitan god Ra as the ultimate judge between Horus and Seth in their fight over the Osirian kingship.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Drawing upon the myth-symbol complex identified by Anthony Smith, this paper links the cultural fields of literary inquiry with cultural sociology in the way that it addresses the linkages between culture, history, and social constructions of gender. Drawing on a textual short story by Salwa Bakr as a case study, this paper addresses how cultural constructions of gender and nationality play into how women, in the late 1950s in Egypt, contributed to the construction of social history and identity as Muslim, nationalistic, Egyptian women within their society through their writing.

Publication Type: Individual Paper
Abstract: Though Sun Ra’s music is most often associated with his musical orientation toward free jazz and his philosophical orientations toward Egyptology and cosmology, a close examination of his music indicates a consistent and yet often conflicted grounding in the most fundamental traditions of African American music. Graham Lock writes, for instance, of the thematic and rhetorical elements from the spirituals that can be found in Sun Ra’ music while, at the same time, documenting his fundamentally anti-religious stance. This essay will comment upon the manner in which Sun Ra consistently worked within established African American expressive traditions, signifying upon them to such an extent as to often seem disconnected from their mainstream. In creating a distinct compositional style and language, elements of the blues, ragtime, and spirituals were assimilated and re-combined in such a fashion as to seemingly present themselves as new musical genres, serving not only to provide racial and political commentary on American society but also to challenge the very epistemological foundations upon which American and European histories have been constructed. The very nature of such a radical social commentary forged from traditional expressive materials suggests that, far from being a cultural outsider, Sun Ra served as an archetypical trickster figure, in the Gatesian sense, whose signification upon traditional materials is both clarifying and complicating.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Although unions are a traditional constituency of leftist parties in Brazil, leftist deputies have increasingly voted for legislation that counters unions’ interests. What accounts for this disparity in representation? I argue that institutions shaped leftist deputies’ decisions at both the electoral and congressional level. Leftist deputies had institutionally-induced electoral incentives to support fiscal adjustment policies that were favored by business firms who had become important new financial contributors to leftist deputies’ campaigns. They also faced institutionally-induced congressional incentives to vote with the governing coalition, regardless of how reform affected traditional allies, or face sanction by the party and President. Analyzing leftist deputies’ votes in the 51st (1999-2003) versus 52nd Congresses (2003-2007), I show that both campaign contributions from corporations and membership in the governing coalition play a significant role in determining leftist deputies’ anti-union votes.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper examines the role of cold war communication science and technology in the work of African American musicians and social movements during the 1950s-1970s with an eye toward showing how artifacts carry different cultural meanings across racial lines and within political and social groups. Through a comprehensive survey of the recordings, liner notes, performances, and films of Sun Ra and the 1960s jazz avant-garde and the documents, art, and writings of Black Panther Party members this paper presents an African American uptake of cold war information science and technology. While a number of studies have explored the cultural use of cybernetics and technology in the 1960s among primarily white cultural and political movements, this paper demonstrates how Sun Ra, the jazz avant-garde and members of the Black Panther Party appropriated technologies and made them central to their identities as core components of their fundamentally performative projects to change consciousness in response to the psychological alienation caused by racism and the workings of a technocratic, capitalistic society. As such, their work represents a cultural proto-informational imagining that runs parallel to much of the cybernetic research of these two decades. Yet, the different artifacts they appropriated and contrasting ways in which they redeployed and reconceived technologies reveals competing ideologies and broader conflicts during the 1960s over the meanings of black consciousness, politics, and social change. This paper concludes by suggesting how a re-signification of technologies occurred as they circulated outside of the communities that had access to the science itself.