Disordering the Border: Harryette Mullen’s Transaborder Poetics in Muse & Drudge
This essay reads Harryette Mullen’s epic poem Muse & Drudge as an innovative text of the US-Mexico borderlands by focusing on Mullen’s literal and figurative transactions between multiple discourses, including Spanish, and the corresponding sets of material conditions these discourses conjure to understand how Muse & Drudge reveals the ongoing racialization and exploitation of African American women and Latinas. I identify a transaborder politics in Muse & Drudge in which shared colonial histories unite Afro-Caribbean diasporic and borderlands subjects. In Mullen’s poetics, themes of separation, definition, and regulation are racialized concepts, deeply embedded in the violent histories of racial mixing and mestizaje that are both named outright and alluded to metaphorically by her hybridized language.
Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry
Beginning with a deceptively simple question What do we mean when we designate behaviors, values, or forms of expression as black ? Evie Shockley s "Renegade Poetics" separates what we think we know about black aesthetics from the more complex and nuanced possibilities the concept has long encompassed. The study reminds us, first, that even among the radicalized young poets and theorists who associated themselves with the Black Arts Movement that began in the mid-1960s, the contours of black aesthetics were deeply contested and, second, that debates about the relationship between aesthetics and politics for African American artists continue into the twenty-first century.Shockley argues that a rigid notion of black aesthetics commonly circulates that is little more than a caricature of the concept. She sees the Black Aesthetic as influencing not only African American poets and their poetic production, but also, through its shaping of criteria and values, the reception of their work. Taking as its starting point the young BAM artists and activists insistence upon the interconnectedness of culture and politics, this study delineates how African American poets in particular, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, Harryette Mullen, Anne Spencer, Ed Roberson, and Will Alexander generate formally innovative responses to their various historical and cultural contexts. Out of her readings, Shockley eloquently builds a case for redefining black aesthetics "descriptively," to account for nearly a century of efforts by African American poets and critics to name and tackle issues of racial identity and self-determination. In the process, she resituates innovative poetry that has been dismissed, marginalized, or misread because its experiments "were not" recognizably black or, in relation to the avant-garde tradition, because they "were.""
Using Fuzzy-Delphi technique to determine the concession period in BOT projects
BOT projects are affected by several risks and uncertainties. One of the most important issues in this type of contract is to determine the length of concession period considering these uncertainties. The previous studies have developed several models to determine the concession period. However, the uncertainties are not taking into account in most of the previous works. Moreover, none of the previous researches has the capability to aggregate the opinions of different experts being involved in a project regarding the values of the uncertain input parameters. In this research, a Fuzzy-Delphi technique is implemented to determine the length of concession period considering uncertainties. Using the proposed Fuzzy-Delphi technique, the values of different uncertain factors affecting a BOT project is determined considering opinions of a group of experts. The NPV value is calculated considering the resulted aggregated values of uncertain input parameters. Finally, the concession period is determined using fuzzy approach. A case study is conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed methodology. It is shown that the concession period is determined more effectively using the proposed approach.