No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This dissertation is an intransigent probing into the Enlightenment scientific conjectures and theories of the eighteenth century that fantasized into existence a character called ‘Man.’ It explores how the category of the human, particularly at the intersection of certain genres like ‘race’ and ‘gender,’ was elaborated in the scientific thought of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment and later re-scripted in contemporary art, literature, and film, both from the Afro-diaspora and otherwise. Working at the nexus of several intersecting threads of scholarship, including comparative literature, black feminist theory, performance studies, slavery studies, memory studies, and the history of science, this dissertation examines how this Enlightenment scientific writing and experimentation on the human turned to people racialized black, specifically young women—their bodies, their children—to construct speculative (and to a large degree, enduring) conceptions of a Western ‘Man’ universalized as the only iteration of the human. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the notion of the human was not a given but a problem, an unfixed nexus of ideas, contested beliefs, and scientific experiment central to the shifting conception of Western ‘Man.’ This dissertation sets out to emphasize both the “performative” and the “speculative” nature of these shifting perceptions as they were played out through the literal commodification of people racialized black and non-white. This commodification within scientific practice of the period not only perpetuated the ideologies of the system of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade, but also directly informed the evolution of these competing, scientific theories of the human. The labor these individuals racialized non-white were asked to contribute in the name of eighteenth-century science (via, for instance, their circulation and participation as subjects in experiments) would support the continuation of a scientific empire unapologetically structured around an anthropocentric project of whiteness. This dissertation is structured around three core “Acts,” organized respectively around Denise Ferreira da Silva’s three onto-epistemological pillars of Western ‘Man’—separability, determinacy, and sequentiality. Each Act engages in reading practices in which the eighteenth-century archive is analyzed both through fiction and as a type of fiction. This type of reading helps denaturalize this Enlightenment archive’s performative fictions, pulling to the surface the speculative maneuvers at play in the formation of the category of ‘Man’ that continue, to this day, to present themselves as objective, axiomatic, factual, and universal. Through these cross-temporal analyses, this dissertation seeks to remain attentive to the ways in which the memories, postmemories, afterlives, and current-day lived legacies of this history all speak to a scholarly and artistic need to continue wrestling with the conundrums that this historical and intellectual construction of the human has left in its wake.

This dissertation examines the conflict over slavery and freedom in Philadelphia from 1820 to 1847. As the northernmost southern city in a state that bordered three slave states, Philadelphia maintained a long tradition of abolitionism and fugitive slave activity. Conflicts that arose over fugitive slaves and the kidnapping of free African-Americans forced Philadelphians to confront the politics of slavery. This dissertation argues that until 1847, Pennsylvania was in effect a slave state. The work of proslavery groups, namely slave masters, their agents, white and black kidnappers, and local, state, and national political supporters, undermined the ostensible successes of state laws designed to protect the freedom of African-Americans in Pennsylvania. Commonly referred to as “liberty laws,” this legislation exposed the inherent difficulty in determining the free or enslaved status of not only fugitive slaves but also African-American kidnapping victims. By studying the specific fugitive or kidnapping cases that inspired these liberty laws, one finds that time and again African-Americans and their allies forced white politicians to grapple with the reality that Pennsylvania was not a safe-haven for African-Americans, regardless of their condition of bondage or freedom. Furthermore, these cases often precipitated into desperate rescues and bloody riots on the streets of Philadelphia; these civil wars in miniature reflected the negotiated and compromised realities of living while black in the city. Ordinary African-Americans living in Philadelphia bore the burden of comity, or friendly relations between states, by practicing what I term “street diplomacy”: the up-close and personal struggles over freedom and slavery that had local, state, and national ramifications. In a larger sense, street diplomacy in Philadelphia magnified the stakes of national comity, i.e. the Union, by showcasing how dividing states by their condition of bondage remained impossible due to permeable geographic borders that fostered perpetual fugitive slave and kidnapping crises. Thus, this dissertation argues that African-Americans and their allies’ struggles with slave-masters, slave-catchers, kidnappers and proslavery politicians disrupted the best efforts of white politicians to maintain a compromised and compromising Union. / History

This project argues that Octavia's Butler's construction of the black woman characters is unique within the pantheon of late eighties African-American writers primarily through Butler's celebration of black female physicality and the agency the black body provides. The project is divided into five sections beginning with an intensive examination of Butler's ur-character, Anyanwu. This character is vitally important in discussing Butler's canon because she embodies the attributes and thematic issues that run throughout the author's work, specifically, the author's argument that black woman are provided opportunity through their bodies. Chapter two addresses the way black women's femininity is judged: their sexual activity. In this chapter, I explore one facet of Octavia Butler's narrative examination of sexual co-option and her subsequent implied challenge to definitions of feminine morality through the character Lilith who appears throughout Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy. Specifically, I explore this subject using Harriet Jacobs' seminal autobiography and slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as the prism in which I historically focus the conversation. In chapter three, I move the discussion into an exploration of black motherhood. Much like the aforementioned challenge to femininity vis-à-vis sexual morality, Octavia Butler often challenges and interrogates the traditional definition of motherhood, specifically, the relationship between mother and daughter. I will focus on different aspects of that mother/daughter relationship in two series, the Patternist sequence, which includes, in chronological order, Wild Seed, Mind of my Mind and Patternmaster. Chapter four discusses Butler's final novel, Fledgling, and how the novel's protagonist, Shori not only fits into the matrix of Butler characters but represents the culmination of the privileging of black female physicality that I observe in the author's entire canon. Specifically, while earlier characters are shown to create opportunities and venues of agency through their bodies, in Shori, Butler posits a character whose existence is predicated on its blackness and discusses how that purposeful racial construction leads to freedom. / English

The objective of the thesis is to introduce a new fuzzy logic control application, develop the associated mathematical theory and prove the concept and its advantages through comparative simulation with existing, classical, methods. A stable fuzzy logic controller for the master-slave current sharing loop of a paralleled DC-DC system is presented that exhibits a considerably improved large signal performance over the presently employed, small signal designed compensators, both in terms of system response and control effort. Because of high system complexity, the present small signal designs are unable to give a good response for large load changes and line transients. Fuzzy logic, by dealing naturally with nonlinearities, offers a superior controller type, for this type of applications. The design uses a PID expert to derive the fuzzy inference rules, and simulation results show a good parameter insensitive transient response over a wide range load-step responses, e.g., from 25% to 75% of the nominal load. Current sharing control is formulated as a tracking problem and stability is ensured through adaptation or supervisory control on a Lyapunov trajectory. The technique benefits also from the heuristic approach to the problem that overcomes the complexity in modeling such systems and, hence, offers a practical engineering tool, amenable to both analog and digital implementations. / Ph. D.

yes / The aim of this paper is to examine the notion of social mechanisms by comparison with the notions of evolutionary and physical mechanisms. It is argued that social mechanisms are based on trends, and not lawlike regularities, so that social mechanisms are different from mechanisms in the natural sciences. Taking as an example of social causation the abolition of the slave trade, the paper argues that social mechanisms should be incorporated in Weber’s wider notion of adequate causation in order to achieve their explanatory purpose.