Animals Speaking in the Fiction of Jin and Malamud
In his article "Animals Speaking in the Fiction of Jin and Malamud" Matt Prater discusses "The Jewbird" by Bernard Malamud and "A Composer and His Parakeets" by Ha Jin as transcultural texts which involve non-human animals as major characters. Jin and Malamud examine differing representations of animal language and how these representations connect to the politics of both interspecies and transnational relationships. By applying critical animal studies and transnational discourse and by charting the interlinking of other-ings by theorists such as Carol Adams and Susan Kappeler, Prater attempts to show that animals figure into transcultural and transnational discourses in ways other than the symbolic
Falling Into America: The Downside of Transnational Identities in Ha Jin’s A Good Fall
Typically in fiction, an immigrant character who possesses or develops a transnational identity throughout the course of a literary work is a character with an almost trickster-like ability for adaption. Sometimes a few hard intercultural lessons must be learned, but eventually the character fluidly moulds to the new culture, speaks several languages, celebrates traditions, and behaves like a native in two or more cultural environments. As Sucheng Chan states in the preface to Chinese Americans and the Politics of Race and Culture, „they revel in their in-betweenness, their hybridity, their flexible citizenship. They are free to shuttle, like astronauts, around the globe.‟ 1 Such characters epitomise the ideal, transnational protagonist. Of course, there is the occasional slip up, like Moon Orchid in The Woman Warrior who goes crazy from culture shock, but most characters in the end achieve a transnational flexibility. Not so with the characters in Ha Jin‟s A Good Fall. Because of poverty, discrimination, lack of education and exploitation, many of Ha Jin‟s characters fall under the category of immigrants Sucheng Chan refers to as transmigrants. Chan writes, „The main beneficiaries of transnationalism are well educated and, in many instances, rich individuals who can work and invest wherever the best opportunities may be found.‟ Such people contrast with other migrants, „transmigrants: contract workers and people without legal travel documents ... who are driven by poverty to risk their lives in order to earn a living outside their countries of origin ... necessity, rather than liberty, is the driving force.‟ 2
The MR-TOF-MS isobar separator for the TITAN facility at TRIUMF
At TRIUMF’s Ion Trap for Atomic and Nuclear Science (TITAN) a multiple-reflection time-of-flight mass spectrometer (MR-TOF-MS) will extend TITAN’s capabilities and facilitate mass measurements and in-trap decay spectroscopy of exotic nuclei that so far have not been possible due to strong isobaric contamination. This MR-TOF-MS will also enable mass measurements of very short-lived nuclides (half-life > 1 ms) that are produced in very low quantities (a few detected ions overall). In order to allow the installation of an MR-TOF-MS in the restricted space on the platform, on which the TITAN facility is located, novel mass spectrometric methods have been developed. Transport, cooling and distribution of the ions inside the device is done using a buffer gas-filled RFQ-based ion beam switchyard. Mass selection is achieved using a dynamic retrapping technique after time-of-flight analysis in an electrostatic isochronous reflector system. Only due to the combination of these novel methods the realization of an MR-TOF-MS based isobar separator at TITAN has become possible. The device has been built, commissioned off-line and is currently under installation at TITAN.