Binary, Bipartite Motifs and Counter-Hegemonic Strategies in Tanure Ojaide’s The Activist

Language use is central to Tanure Ojaide’s The Activist, negotiating a better living environment for the people of the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. Most literary essays on this text, however, overlook Ojaide’s deployment of language to achieve his subversive vision. The text has been interpreted as environmentalism colored by an ideology or artistic documentation of the despoiled ecosystem, its effects on humans, the flora and fauna of the Niger Delta, and the consequential eco-activism. Another read of the text, however, reveals a binary relationship of dominance and subversion in which language is significant to both sides of the intercourse. The existence of dominance and resistance, therefore, necessitates the analysis of the text drawing from the Subaltern theory, an aspect of the Postcolonial theory to which dominance and resistance are central. This essay examines the deployment of language as a hegemonic and subversive tool in the oil politics in the Niger Delta. The binary relationship is couched in bi-partite motifs captured in epithets and contrasting images. In the binary, the multinational oil companies operating in the Niger Delta yoked with the Nigerian military government, are juxtaposed with the people and the Niger Delta as oppressors and the oppressed. Through bipartite motifs that abound in the text, Ojaide concretizes the duality in the Nigerian society vis-a-vis the oil politics in the Niger Delta. In the duality, language is reinvented and mobilized significantly by both sides as a tool for demonizing and excluding each other to enable the subjugation or subversion of the other.

Mutual Implication as a Measure of Textual Equivalence

Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) and paraphrase de- tection are two NLP tasks that have a high focus on the meaning of sentences, and current research in both re- lies heavily on comparing fragments of text. Little to no work has been done in studying inference-centric ap- proaches to solve these tasks. We study the relation be- tween existing work and what we call mutual implica- tion (MI), a binary relationship between two sentences that holds when they textually entail each other. MI thus shifts the focus of STS and paraphrase detection to un- derstanding the meaning of a sentence in terms of its in- ferential properties. We study the comparison between MI, paraphrasing, and STS work. We then argue that MI should be considered a complementary evaluation met- ric for advancing work in areas as diverse as machine translation, natural language inference, etc. Finally, we study the limitations of MI and discuss possibilities for overcoming them.

تقديم المفضول على الفاضِل في باب أفعال المكلَّفين، أسبابه وضوابطه

تُعَدّ هذه الدراسة (تقديم المفضول على الفاضل) المبنيّة على المنهَج الوصفي الاستنباطي، من الدّراسات الخادمة لفقه الواقع القائمِ على آليّة الموازنة والتنسيق بين الاقتضاءين الأصلي والتبعي. وتسعى إلى تبيين مسألة عدول المكلّف عن الفاضل المفضّل في ميزان الشّرع إلى المفضولِ في ميزانه الأفضلِ بحقّه، وقد بيّنت أنه يرجع إلى أربعة أسباب: الخصوصية النّصيّة، وفيه أنّ النّصّ يُملي تقديم المفضول عندَه على وجه الوجوب أو النّدب. والعوامل الظّرفيّة، وفيه أنّ الزّمان والمكان يُمليان على المكلف العمل بالمفضول لضيق الحيّز مع اتّساع حيّز الفاضل. واقتران الفاضل بمفسدةٍ راجحة، وهي العجزُ عن أدائه، أو صعوبة الإتيان به، أو لزوم الإخلال بالعبادة إذا تعيّن، وكونه ذريعةً إلى مفسدةٍ أكبر، وغير ذلك من المفاسد. واقتران المفضول بمصلحةٍ راجحة، كزيادة الانتفاع بالعبادة، ومناسبة المفضول المقامَ كمقام البِرّ ومقام القُدوة وغيرهما.. ثُمّ بعدَ بسطِ الأسباب سِيقَت جملةٌ من الضّوابط التي تحكم عمليّة التّفضيل، ومنها التحقق من ثبوت مشروعيّة الحُكمِ، وازدواجيّة تحقيق المناط بين المفتي والسائل، والتنبيه على هذا العارض الطارئ، وغير ذلك.. وخلصت الدراسة إلى نتائج أهمّها أنّ معيار الأفضليّة يحكمه واقع المرء، وأوصت بالعناية بهذا النوع من الفقه في رصيد المفتي، وضبطه أكثر من خلال الدراسات المعمقة. كلمات مفتاحيّة الفاضل - المفضول - الأفضل - التفضيل - التقديم - المصلحة - الواقع - الموازنة Abstract The research mainly adopts the descriptive/ deductive methodology. It employs a realistic, juristic approach into attaining a balanced view of what’s “honorable” vs ““the Virtuous” through explaining the reasons of preferring the virtuous to the “honorable” deed in the original concept of Islamic legislation. The research attributes this to the mechanics of the text itself; which means that the text states the utter preference of the virtuous either as mandatory or optional, depending occasional circumstances such as time or place obligations. Reasons can also include if the honorable is associated with an evident sin, breaching of worshiping or corruption. Same applies if it is connected with potential hardship. On the other hand, of the virtuous is preferred if it is believed to be coupled with a preponderant interest such as sound worshiping and righteousness. The research then states three other factors governing the preference process, namely: the verification of the legitimacy of judgment, the binary relationship of the Mufti and the fatwa seeker, in addition to the emergency of the situation. The research concludes to the importance played by the reality of Fatwa situation in deciding what to prefer. It also recommends more investigations of those Fatawa in future studies.

Purple hats and threatened Whiteness in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Everything That Rises Must Converge’

Among Flannery O’Connor’s stories, ‘Everything That Rises Must Converge’ is one of the most frequently anthologized. Although the story explicitly addresses the southern reaction to integration measures taken in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, critics of the story tend to gloss over the binary relationship between Whiteness and Blackness, the extent of White privilege, and the limits of Black tolerance. Although the story was published over half a century ago, it has contemporary relevance in America, where politics still intertwine with White supremacy. The alt-right, characterized by their neo-conservative and racist ideologies, continues to flourish under the banner of ‘protecting national values’ and mirror the assumptions of White superiority that Julian’s mother embodies in ‘Everything That Rises Must Converge’. O’Connor treats White privilege and pre-Civil Rights racial habits as they exist in a seemingly ordinary interaction between Julian’s mother and Carver’s mother. As Whiteness exists only in relation to the binary contrast of Blackness, Julian’s mother defines her imagined status of White privilege against an imagined category of Black submission as she attempts to preserve her social status. The sameness she shares with Carver’s mother on the bus – a sense of self-worth, a commonality in dress, and a quiet alienation in her motherhood of a son – threatens her culturally instilled view of fixed paradigms of behaviour based upon outdated racial constructs of Whiteness and Blackness.

MOTIVE AS THE HIGHEST FORM OF NEEDFUL AROUSAL

The definition of motive is considered. The research is based on the information and mathematical approach. The method is based on comparing two types of information available to the decision-maker. Firstly, it is the prognostic information on all means necessary for successful achievement of the goal; secondly, it is the pragmatic information on the means available for this purpose actually. Information has a numerical measure, and thus can be mathematized. Motivation is defined as mental activity to set a goal, formulate a motive and create a program of actions aimed at meeting the need. In the process of motivation the need passes through the stages of a hidden, objectified, specified and actualized need. Ultimately, it becomes an active need. These stages correspond to a needful arousal in the form of attraction, impulse, desire and intention, respectively. Intention turns into a motive that becomes a needful arousal that accompanies an active (motivated) need. The result of motivation is an integral formation called a binary relationship "motive-goal". It is shown that motive does not exist as a separate mental essence. It can be considered only within the framework of this binary relation. The analysis of the motivational process leads to the following definition: motive is the highest form of needful arousal that meets the actual need.

Psychoanalysis under Occupation: Nonviolence and Dialogue Initiatives as a Psychic Extension of the Closure System

This article examines how ‘dialogue initiatives’ function as the psychic extension of Israel's Apartheid closure system and as an act of ‘extractive introjection.’ The article pays particular critical attention to the political and psychological fallacies offered by the theoretical concept (or phantasy) of ‘third space,’ which purportedly provides a possibility for ‘co-created’ space that extricates victim and victimized from their binary relationship. Rather, the author proposes that ‘third space’ facilitates Israelis’ theft of Palestinian individual and collective psychic life. In response, the author posits that sumud, or acts of refusal and ‘stalwartness,’ functions as a psychological means of defending against these assaults within the dehumanizing spatial, material, and social realities of Israel's closure system in the West Bank and Gaza.

Memorial Traces as Tropes of Postcolonial Hauntings in Robert Lalonde’s Sept Lacs plus au Nord and Nina Bouraoui’s Mes mauvaises pensées

This article is a comparative analysis of the language of memory in two auto-fictional narratives by two postcolonial francophone authors of mixed background, belonging to the area of Québec (Robert Lalonde) and Algeria (Nina Bouraoui). It will be argued that both authors seek to deconstruct the binary relationship of the spaces and identities they each belong to (white-Amerindian for Robert Lalonde vs. Franco-Algerian for Nina Bouraoui) through a specific poetics of writing or language of memory. At the same time, they each return cyclically in their writing to the postcolonial spaces, memories and histories of their respective non-Western cultures, as if ‘haunted’ by these spaces. Using the method of close textual reading in a comparative postcolonial francophone context, the article aims to show how the language of memory is deployed in the two narratives chosen. It demonstrates that both authors use the figure of the memorial trace as a trope of haunting in order to construct that language. It concludes that the figures of memory identified in the two texts analyzed give rise to a series of ‘postcolonial hauntings’ producing a postcolonial discourse of ambiguity rather than resistance.

A Note on Borders, Dyads and the Distribution of Democracy in Sub-Saharan Africa

In this note we use dyadic data to address the issue of the spread of political regimes in Sub-Saharan Africa from 1977 to 2014. Dyadic data are binary relationship between countries and provide a data-rich environment for the study of international relations. We address the issue of correlation between these dyadic observations, which generates a cluster of dependent observations associated with that country. We find that borders matter, since often the effect of home- and foreign-grown variables have differentiated effects on democracy in one country.

Idiocy and the Conceptual Economy of Madness

The binary relationship between ‘intellectual disability’ and ‘mental illness’ is widely regarded as self-evident and long-established. This chapter demonstrates that the historical, and continuing, relationship between intellectual disability and psychiatry is, in fact, ambiguous and inconsistent. Beginning with the nosology of William Cullen in the latter part of the seventeenth century, the chapter explores the dispersal of madness across all the branches of disease and illness. The advent of alienism and Pinel’s nosology of madness, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, produced much flatter conceptual structures, in which idiocy was one of the various forms of madness. As psychiatry developed, the position of idiocy shifted. Maudsley located it in a separate branch, though still not separated in a binary manner from insanity. Lastly, the nosology of the neurologist Spitzka became more nuanced and layered, though still without a binary separation of idiocy. The chapter takes the view that the lack of any consistent underlying paradigm in psychiatry will continue to make the presence and position of intellectual disability impossible to fix. Psychoanalytic and neo-Jasperian psychiatry thoroughly exclude it as an object of investigation.

‘Le geste architectural’; Symbolism and authority in the case of the Centre Beaubourg

Architecture seems often imbued with the notion of “gesture.” The term is mentioned in abundance both when architecture is seen as a discipline and when it is seen as a social practice. Arguments about it can be found in an artefact as well as in an act of design. In this context it may be revealed as an object to be claimed (i.e., a fetish), or stand for a trace or a carrier of meaning. Thus, in a wider scope, gesture may be discussed as a persistent – if not necessary – theme in the field’s culture. This essay examines “gesture” as a mediator between society (including culture and power) and the practice of architecture. This will be discussed within the framework of the competition for the Centre Beaubourg (later known as Centre Georges Pompidou). The heated discourse revolving around the expression “le geste architectural,” including the proposal to design the building literally as an open hand and thereby as a gesture of offering, will be explored. We will thus show how “gesture” simultaneously creates a multifaceted existence: at once as a token of validity and a symbol of truth and beauty, as well as representing the very danger of banality. Furthermore, we will show how the Centre itself – to which was attributed the character of a feat – becomes a “political gesture” carrying the sperm that spawned the type of “heroic architecture” that is so distinctive to the Fifth Republic. Finally, we will revisit “gesture” as a token taking part in a conundrum where the modern ideal ends up substituting genuineness with genius ; and we will see this binary relationship in connection to all the “gestures” we discuss in the case of the Centre Beaubourg. On these premises we will propose that, before we ask to define “gesture” by its content, it is important to see it first and foremost for what it does ; namely, that it acts as a nominator, and thereby as a mediator, and even a weaver, of the collective between architecture and society. This shift in perspective is critical, as it reveals that gesture plays a more dynamic role than any doctrine would like to have it. Ultimately, we hope to show that gesture can be seen as taking an integral part in the very fabric of architecture, instead of merely playjng a role in one of its many histories. This essay is based on existing literature as well as original research conducted in the archives of the Centre Georges Pompidou – to which we extend our gratitude for the access.