Taxation Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Taxation - Research Paper Example Taper Relief: Land: non-business asset Qualifying holding periods: 7 whole years Chargeable gains before taper relief 74,286 Chargeable gains after taper relief @75% 55,714.5 Explanation In the above scenario, the acquisition date is assumed to be 1 November 1998. This entails that there could be no indexation allowance in this scenario because indexation allowance is deducted on gains obtained from disposal of assets that were acquired before April 1998. Because only three acres of land were sold for 80,000, the cost that is subtracted from the acquisition cost is the one that is deductible, as shown in the calculation. The retained or unsold part of the land has not been taken as allowable cost. Because the asset was acquired after 5 April 1998, therefore, it is subject to tamper relief. The qualifying holding period from 1 November 1998 to 14 December 2005 appear to be 7 years and 44 days, however it should only consider whole years, which in this case is 7 yeas. The land is assumed to be a non-business asset and thus the tamper relief is applied @ 75% which reduced the chargeable gains by 25%. D): Disposal Proceeds 6,300 Less: Costs 1,340 Gain before indexation 4,960 Chargeable Gains Nil Explanation Racehorse is a wasting chattel and therefore is always exempted from the calculation of capital gains tax. The gains obtained on a wasting chattel is never included in chargeable gians. No tamper relief has to be calculated because racehorse is already exempted from capital gains tax. E) Because the asset was purchased in May 1971 and held at 31 March 1982, the chargeable gains are to be calculated with the help of 'Rebasing rules': Rebased gain (new...Therefore, the qualifying period will be counted from 6 April 1998. This makes 7 years and 146 days or whole 7 years. It was a non-business asset, therefore the rate for taper relief has been applied at 75%. In the above scenario, the acquisition date is assumed to be 1 November 1998. This entails that there could be no indexation allowance in this scenario because indexation allowance is deducted on gains obtained from disposal of assets that were acquired before April 1998. Because only three acres of land were sold for 80,000, the cost that is subtracted from the acquisition cost is the one that is deductible, as shown in the calculation. The retained or unsold part of the land has not been taken as allowable cost. Because the asset was acquired after 5 April 1998, therefore, it is subject to tamper relief. The qualifying holding period from 1 November 1998 to 14 December 2005 appear to be 7 years and 44 days, however it should only consider whole years, which in this case is 7 yeas. *Indexation allowance for rebasing rules is always based higher of allowable costs before 31 March 1982 (i.e. acquisition cost in the above scenario) and the 31 March 1982 market value. Because of the fact that market value at 31 March 1982 is higher than that of the acquisition cost, 6500 has been taken to calculate indexation allowance. The oil painting was acquired in May 1971, there

Colonization of Brazil Essay Example for Free

Colonization of Brazil Essay In 1549, the Captaincy Colonies of Brazil were united into the Governorate General of Brazil, where they were provincial captaincies of Brazil; Luà ­s Teixeira, 1574. Main article: Colonial Brazil Explorer Pedro à lvares Cabral landed on April 22, 1500 in what is today Porto Seguro, Brazil. Permanent habitation did not begin until Sà £o Vicente was founded in 1532, although temporary trading posts were established earlier to collect brazilwood, used as a dye. From 1534 to 1536, 15 Captaincy colonies were created in Portuguese America. The captaincies were autonomous, and mostly private, colonies of the Portuguese Empire, each owned and run by a Captain-major. In 1549, due to their failure and limited success, the Captaincy Colonies of Brazil were united into the Governorate General of Brazil. The captaincy colonies were reorganized as provincial districts to the Governorate. The captaincies continued to be ruled by their hereditary captain-majors but they now reported to the Governor-General of Brazil. The new system was implemented so that Portuguese America could be managed correctly and provide a steady and wealthy income for the Portuguese Empire. The capital of the new governorate established its capital at Sà £o Salvador and the first Jesuits arrived the same year. With permanent settlement came the establishment of the sugar cane industry and its intensive labor demands which were met with Native and later African slaves. From 1565 through 1567, Mem de Sà ¡, the third Governor General of Brazil, successfully destroyed a ten year-old French colony called France Antarctique, at Guanabara Bay. He and his nephew, Està ¡cio de Sà ¡, then founded the city of Rio de Janeiro on March 1567. In 1621, Philip II of Portugal divided the Governorate General of Brazil into two separate and autonomous colonies, the State of Maranhà £o and the State of Brazil. Regarding this period it is preferable to refer to Portuguese America rather than Portuguese Brazil or Colonial Brazil, as the states were two separate colonies, each with their own governor general and government. Between 1630 and 1654, the Netherlands came to control part of Brazils Northeast region, with their capital in Recife. The Portuguese won a significant victory in the Second Battle of Guararapes in 1649. By 1654, the Netherlands had surrendered and returned control of all Brazilian land to the Portuguese. In 1751, the State of Maranhà £o was restructured into State of Grà £o-Parà ¡ and Maranhà £o, with a new capital and government. In 1772, the State of Grà £o-Parà ¡ and Maranhà £o was split into two new states, the State of Grà £o-Parà ¡ and Rio Negro and the State of Maranhà £o and Piauà ­. The new states would fair poorly and only last 3 years. In 1775, the three colonies of Portuguese America (the State of Brazil, the State of Maranhà £o and Piauà ­, and the State of Grà £o-Parà ¡ and Rio Negro) were united into a singular colony, under the State of Brazil. This arrangement would last until the end of Colonial Brazil. As a result, Brazil did not split into several countries, as happened to its Spanish-speaking neighbors.

Cooperative Education Opens Doors for Students :: Journalism Journalistic Essays

Cooperative Education Opens Doors for Students As the college application deadline draws nearer, high school seniors across the country will make their final decisions as to what handful of colleges and universities will receive the applications they rigorously spent their autumn weekends working on. Each year students consult different college prep tools to aid them with their continual search for the â€Å"right† school. Whether it city versus suburban, large versus small or public versus private; high school seniors today have a schmorgous board of options for furthering their education. However, a trend in education that is growing more popular in recent years, perhaps most notably at Northeastern University, is cooperative education. Northeastern was ranked #1 in 2003 among institutions that require students to combine classroom learning with real-world experience by U.S. News and World Report. Cooperative education, more commonly known as co-op, is emerging as a poplar way to stay ahead of the competition while in college. Started in 1909, one of the first co-op programs in the United States, Northeastern has a unique program that alternates periods of classroom learning with period of â€Å"real world† working experience outside the classroom. Students work full time in fields that are related to their future education pursuits and these are usually paid jobs. The co-op job allows the student to try out various jobs while still an undergraduate. The typical Northeastern student graduates with as much as two years of on-the-job experience already on his resume. Katie McDonald, 19, a sophomore at Northeastern is currently going through the process of beginning co-op. McDonald, who is a nursing major, will start her first job this January at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. â€Å"At first I was shocked at the whole process of interviewing and finding a job. Freshman year I looked forward to it, but once it came I was a little overwhelmed. Once I got started with it though, I found the process relatively easy. Now that I have interviewed and have a job I am really excited to begin,† said McDonald. Although students aren’t guaranteed a job every co-op period, known among students as â€Å"No-op†, there are faculty advisors who stay in close contact with employers to develop and maintain interesting salaried positions. Finding a co-op job, similar to any competitive job hunt, depends upon the candidate’s qualifications as compared with others, the current needs of the organization, the specific demands of the position and the job market in general.

Cultural Erasure Essay

The Caribbean can be many things to many people: a geographic region somewhere in America’s backyard, an English-speaking outpost of the British Empire, an exciting holiday destination for North Americans and Europeans, a place where dirty money is easily laundered, and even an undefined, exotic area that contains the dreaded Bermuda Triangle, the mythical lost city of El Dorado, the fabled Fountain of Youth and the island home of Robinson Crusoe. Enriched by the process of creolization, the cosmopolitanism of the average Caribbean person is also well recognized: ‘No Indian from India, no European, no African can adjust with greater ease and naturalness to new situations’ (Lamming 1960, 34). As a concept or notion ‘the Caribbean’ can also be seen to have a marvellous elasticity that defies the imposition of clear geographic boundaries, has no distinct religious tradition, no agreed-upon set of political values, and no single cultural orientation. What, then, is the Caribbean? Who can justifiably claim to belong to it? Of the various peoples who have come to comprise the region, whose identity markers will be most central in defining the whole? For not all citizens of a nation or a region will be equally privileged and not all will have equal input in the definition of national or regional identity. In other words,  because power implies a process of social negotiation, and because power is unequally distributed in social groups, some parties to the process will be more represented than others. This is where the notion of erasure is tied to any appreciation of identity, and played out in the history and politics of colonization and decolonization in the Caribbean. As might be imagined, the colonially-conditioned divisions of race and gender figured (and continue to figure) prominently in the entire process and bring to mind Bob Marley’s advice to Caribbean people: ‘emancipate your minds from mental slavery’ (Redemption Song). Erasure is in large part the act of neglecting, looking past, minimizing, ignoring or rendering invisible an other. Rhoda Reddock (1996) examines the academic and political consequences of erasure at the level of ethnicity, and draws attention to four (among many other) neglected minorities in the Caribbean: the Amerindians of Guyana, the Karifuna or Caribs of Dominica, the Chinese in Jamaica, and the  Sindhis and Gujaratis in Barbados. Although some of these are indigenous and some have lived in the Caribbean for hundreds of years, they are commonly overlooked, even by those who today claim ‘authentic’ Caribbean roots and a commitment to the region as an integrated whole. In this essay I focus on three recent studies that address the ways in which identity and erasure have come dialectically to embody several erased peoples and groups of people in the Caribbean. I begin with the contributions of Sandra Pouchet Paquet, who focuses on the heyday of colonialism, slavery and women in Caribbean history, and laments the fact that ‘The female ancestor is effectively silenced if not erased’ (Paquet 2002, 11) in the writing of that history. To this end she cites Carole Boyce-Davies and Elaine Fido, who, in assessing the literature and historiography of the region, also spoke of ‘†¦ the historical absence of a specifically female position on major issues such as slavery, colonialism and decolonization, women’s rights and  more direct social and cultural issues’ (1990, 1). Next I examine the contributions of Geert Oostindie and Inge Klinkers (2003), who move from the slave period and colonialism proper and begin to discuss the uneven dismantling of colonialism in the various Caribbean countries, and its persistence in others. In the process they focus on erasure at the wider sub-regional level of groupings of countries. Thus, Oostindie and Klinkers protest the common academic and political tendency to assume that the Caribbean is principally an English-speaking group of countries; a tendency that simultaneously erases or minimizes the presence and contributions of other Caribbean peoples. These authors charge that while this erasure is undeniable in the cases of the Spanish- and French-speaking Caribbean, it is particularly evident with regard to the Dutch Caribbean. For while much has been written on the wider region generally, it is ‘seldom with serious attention to the former Dutch colonies of Suriname, the Netherlands Antilles and Aruba’ (2003, 10). And as they go on to argue, most general histories ‘tend virtually to neglect the Dutch Caribbean’ (p. 234). This ‘neglect’ is synonymous with erasure and constitutes a major obstacle for anyone wishing to develop a truly comprehensive understanding of the entire region. Finally, there are Smart and Nehusi (2000), who invoke the idea of erasure and the attempt by African-ancestored people in the Caribbean, but especially in Trinidad, to resist erasure and reclaim their identity. Smart and Nehusi look at efforts of Afro-Trinidadians to forge a diasporic identity in which culture (Carnival) is the centrepiece of African, ancestral lore. Thus, in describing the trade in African slaves and the institution of New World slavery as ‘the largest crime in human history,’ Nehusi speaks of the Maafa, or the African Holocaust, as a terror that has been hushed up: ‘one part of that crime has been the attempt to forget, to pretend that it did not happen and to present a history ethnically cleansed of all traces of this genocide †¦Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ (Nehusi 2000, 8). Very much in line with the thinking of Smart and Nehusi, Paquet views slavery as a crime and speaks of the ‘depravity of the slave owner’ (p. 42) as she applauds the efforts of Mary Prince to expose the horrors of the system: ‘Prince lays bare for public scrutiny the criminality of slave owners and the legal system that endorses their conduct’ (Paquet 2002, 41). In developing his argument Nehusi hints at a conspiracy or historical hoax which witnessed the abandonment of  black Trinidadians and their treatment as ‘non-persons by a continuing Eurocentric system which refuses to recognize them and their traditions as valid and refuses to recognize the history of struggle, mainly by Afrikan people.’ (Nehusi 2000a, 11). To this Ian Smart adds that ‘Africans all over the globe who have been subjected to white supremacy must be engaged unremittingly in the struggle for liberation in order to be made whole again’ (Smart 2000b, 199). This notion of being ‘made whole again’ speaks directly to the idea of erasure and the recapture of lost identity. Sandra Pouchet Paquet is principally concerned with two things: (a) finding the Caribbean identity and (b) autobiography as a literary genre. She uses the latter to pursue the former. Autobiography does not only tell a story of the biographer, but of the very society and community that shaped and nurtured her/him. So it is not simply a personal recounting of episodes that have shaped one’s life; but if properly written, autobiography can give valuable insights into the social worlds of the various storytellers. To this end Paquet exposes the ‘historical silencing of the female ancestor’ as evidenced in the ‘discovery and republication of the nineteenthcentury narratives of the Hart sisters (Elizabeth and Ann), Mary Prince, and Mary Seacole between 1987 and1993’ (2002, 13). These women bring to light what an inadvertent male scholarship had previously buried: a strong female culture of resistance both before and after emancipation. Unlike similar approaches, this work is careful not to essentialize women. Instead it is sensitive to their individual differences while weaving together common strands in their biographical experiences and narratives to produce a common story of erasure, resistance and strength. In her words they ‘throw light on the idiosyncrasies of a female culture of resistance in the Caribbean before and after emancipation’ (Paquet 2002, 13). Focusing on the signal contributions  of strong women like Elizabeth and Anne Hart, Mary Seacole and Mary Prince, who prepared the way for future leading male Caribbean writers such as C.L.R. James, George Lamming, Derek Walcott and V.S. Naipaul, Paquet does not mince words. In fact she openly acknowledges the unconscious impact of patriarchy, even on those men, and the ways in which they too contributed to the alienation, erasure and misrepresentation of women in Caribbean literary culture (p. 73). Clearly reflecting different social trajectories and individual strengths, the narratives of these four women nevertheless contain and speak to essential elements in the forging of a Caribbean identity. Dialectically, their efforts to reverse erasure through resistance culminated in a powerful story of struggle, setback and triumph of the human spirit. The Hart sisters, whose father was a free black, a plantation owner and a slaveholder, both married white men of influence. This gave them an important measure of social capital and they were able to use their religion (Methodism) and social status as the bases from which to promote ideas about racial equality and the empowerment of women. Mary Seacole was a unique woman for her time. The child of a free black Jamaican woman and a Scottish officer, she always set her sights on the wider world beyond Jamaica, and in time she became a creole ‘doctress’, a traveller and adventurer, entrepreneur, sutler and hotelier. The idea is not to romanticize her accomplishments for Seacole was human and vulnerable, and she betrayed all the contradictions of a woman placed in that age and time: resistance, accommodation and admiration for imperialism which contained ‘the civilizing values she professes to honor’ (Paquet 2002, 56). For while she railed against the injustices of race and sex discrimination she did not directly chal- lenge the idea of a British empire as much as she struggled ‘to redefine her place in it’ (p. 56). Seacole could thus be seen as a prototype of the modern-day Afro-Saxon. Then there was Mary Prince, a slave woman who did not have the privileges of the Hart sisters or of Mary Seacole, and thus has a  different take on the colonial situation. Comparing the two Marys (Seacole and Prince), Paquet writes that Prince embodied ‘an embryonic nationalism formed in resistance to slavery’ while Seacole reflected ‘an acceptance of colonialism after slavery’ (p. 52). Mary Prince was a rebel in spirit and action, and her life story is partly a struggle against erasure that illuminates another dimension of the contradictions of the time: Mary Prince was a ‘West Indian slave marooned in England by laws that made slavery illegal in England, while it was still legal in the colonies’ (p. 31). And as Paquet reports, the erasure and contradiction continue even in the twentieth-century male texts referred to above that are ‘devoid of reference to her resistant, militant spirit’ (p. 32). Though generally muted (erased) the voice of the black woman becomes audible in the narrative of Prince whose ‘individual life story establishes and validates a slave woman’s point of viewâ€⠄¢ while simultaneously serving as the foundation for ‘selfidentification and self-fulfilment in anticipation of the historical changes’ that would later follow in the wake of emancipation (p. 33-4). Thus, viewed together, the autobiographies of the Hart sisters, Mary Seacole and Mary Prince afford us an insight into the practical and intellectual worlds of very different women, and into their multifaceted struggles whether as slaves, as women, as free coloureds, as rape victims, and finally as silenced products of colonial brutality. In humanizing themselves through their autobiographies these women are able to expose the dehumanizing conditions under which so many millions were erased. Another key motif in Paquet is that of home and its relationship to errantry, travel, departure and return. These are central themes in Caribbean literature and reflect the post-colonial condition where the forced migrations associated with slavery and indentureship are the backdrops against which post-colonial peoples now seek to establish diasporic existences and to fashion a new ‘way in the world’. The initial trauma of forced removal from their ancestral lands has led to a spirit ual yearning for rootedness and symbolic return to home. Further, the yearning in question is best represented in the notion of primordialism, for it is only at home that one supposedly finds the acceptance and security from which to begin to negotiate one’s way in the world. Thus, ‘travel as exploration and transforming encounter turns on the quest for El Dorado, the lost world, the aboriginal landscape, identity,  origins, ancestry psychic reconnection, and rebirth’ (Paquet 2002, 196). Viewed in this way the Caribbean is both home and an African diasporic home away from home, and to this end Paquet invokes Wilfred Cartey, Carole BoyceDavies, Claude McKay, George Lamming and Edward Kamau Brathwaite to make the case for a ‘holistic Caribbean’ that comprises ‘a culturally diverse yet traditional’ culture block that stresses ‘the genealogical connection with Africa’ (p. 745). While departure could be non-voluntary or forced (slavery), Paquet also focuses on voluntary departure, as in the Caribbean migrant to England or some other metropolitan centre. Often for economic reasons, it is a sort of voluntary exile in Lamming’s thinking, that has given rise to scores of Caribbean diasporas in various Eu ropean metropoles. London, Berlin or Toronto is really a twice-migrant; first from Africa and second from the Caribbean. The connection to an African home is the centrepiece of much contemporary Afrocentric politics, but that connection is largely mythical and imagined, although many commentators seem willing to forget this fact. This speaks directly to the idea of home and belonging as articulated by two unapologetic Afrocentrists, Ian Smart and Kimani Nehusi (2000). For example, there is Nehusi who sees home as ‘a nurturing place, a space of spiritual, psychological, social, and physical comfort, freedom, security and satisfaction, and ultimately confidence, because we know that we will be understood there †¦ humans feel at home only when they can be themselves in culturally familiar ways. Home is therefore †¦ a space that not merely permits but encourages us to be our own selves and in which we are ‘easy’ – not merely familiar, but comfortable too (Nehusi 2000a, 1-2). This essentialist and romantic theme of ‘Africa as home’ is picked up by  Smart who treats all black people as Africans and affirms that the ‘African mind is one that deals with the big picture. The African mind is fundamentally driven by and towards holism’ (Smart 2000a, 51). And apparently unmindful of the process of creolization, Smart goes on boldly to assert that ‘[t]he core of Caribbean culture is the African heritage’ (2000a, 70). All of this is by way of setting the stage for the claim that Trinidad is an African country whose central cultural marker is the Carnival. According to Smart, Nehusi and several of the contributors to the volume in question, Carnival is an African festival that has become the national festival of Trinidad: ‘Carnival is â€Å"a black thing†, a Wosirian (Osirian) mystery play that was celebrated annually in Kemet (Ancient Egypt) from the very dawn of history’ (Smart 2000a, 29). Lamentably, however, the African origins and the signal contributions of Africans are bring erased by a class and colour conspiracy to wrest the festival from its original African founders. In essentialist language, these authors assume that Trinidad means African, that African means black, and that black means poor or working class (Smart 2000a, 63). Thus, the non-black presence in the Carnival, whether as masquerader, bandleader or owner, or costume designer, is all part of the Eurocentric (which is code for white and upper class) attempt to silence and erase the African. For one contributor, Pearl Springer, the consequence is that the Carnival has been reshaped in such as way that the African presence in the national festival is erased or reduced to that of a street vendor and ‘hired hand’ that does the physical labour in making the mas (Springer 2000, 22). Nehusi is in full agreement with this take on erasure of the black person: ‘Afrikan Trinidadians have been abandoned, declared nonpersons by a continuing Eurocentric system which refuses to recognize them and their traditions as valid and refuses to recognize the history of struggle †¦Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ (2000a, 11). Another contributor, Patricia Alleyne Dettmers, invokes the universal African and has no difficulty speaking of ‘Africans †¦ born in Trinidad and Tobago’ (2000, 132). Of particular significance here is the fact that these Afrocentric commentators who rail against the erasure of Africans and the suppression of African identity, simultaneously engage in their own erasure of the East Indian, the Chinese and other ethnic groups in  Trinidad (Allahar 2004, 129-33). Thus, in the same volume, Patricia Moran, affirms that ‘the Caribbean woman is basically African’ (2000, 169). As is clear, like the wider Caribbean region as a whole, the books and authors under review here are not free of contradiction and ambivalence. For the Afrocentric case put forward by writers like Smart and Nehusi (and their five co-authors) clearly looks past the well known erasure of the East Indians’ presence and contributions they have made to such countries as Trinidad, Guyana and Suriname. For this reason David Trotman wrote sarcastically of Trinidad’s supposed multi-racial paradise on the eve of independence (1962) and the racially coloured anticipation that filled the Trinidad air at the time: ‘it was a multi-racial picture from which the Indian seemed strangely absent’ (1991, 393). Trotman speaks of the privileging of African traditions to the neglect of Indian ones, and takes issue with one calypsonian, whose calypso titled ‘Portrait of Trinidad’ only identified the Afro-associated elements of steelband, calypso and carnival as national cultural achievements. This led Trotman wryly to observe: ‘In this portrait the Indian is painted out’ (p. 394). Paquet also laments this erasure as it is articulated by George Lamming and V.S. Naipaul (2002, 176, 189-90). The authors of the studies contained in Smart and Nehusi (2000) speak ideologically to what supposedly binds the community together, for example, common blood lines, common ethno-cultural experience, common collective memory, common African origins and so on. I say supposedly for much of this idea of community cohesiveness is rather mythical or fictional. It is part of the essentialization of Africa and Africans that is common among Afrocentrist commentators, and in the process all others are erased. Further, in the move to homogenize and essentialize Africans, they conveniently ignore those social and structural features that divide the community. I am thinking here of internal, class, colour, economic, and  political inequalities within, say, the so-called African diasporic community, not to mention ideological cleavages related to religion, inter- and intra-ethnic rivalries. Given the role played by myths of ethnic descent in the invoking of national unity and cultural identity, Smart and Nehusi problematize the political dimensions of cultural nationalism as it applies to the Trinidad carnival. They give cultural nationalism a colour – black – which means there are major implications for those who are defined out of the societal culture, for example, those who claim East Indian, Middle Eastern, Chinese, etc., descents. To affirm that Carnival is Trinidad’s national festival implies that the so-called Indo-Trinidadians, who, for whatever reasons, do not see carnival as their national cultural marker, are somehow less than full Trinidadians. In the minds of black nationalists, then, the carnival, which was born in Africa, is the supreme African festival and belongs entirely to black people, who, regardless of where they were born, are Africans! Africa is home for all Africans. This is why Smart depicts the Trinidad carnival as ‘the quintessential African festival’ (2000a, 72), and Nehusi sees the street parade segment of the celebration as symbolic of the Africans’ reclaiming their physical, spiritual and cultural freedom: ‘Possession of the streets was a sign of Afrikan possession of self, a spiritual re-connection with ancestors through millennia of cultural practice, a liberation through expression of impulses carried in genes for uncounted generations †¦.’ (2000b, 96). Some critics have charged that the foregoing constitutes part of the larger racist agenda of those black nationalists who want to define carnival in ethno-racial terms: ‘Trinbagonians can then rightly claim their festival as â€Å"we thing† only because it is a â€Å"black thing†Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ (Smart 2000a, 72). The loose invoking of the royal ‘we’ must not be taken as referring to all Trinbagonians, however, for it is tied to the deliberate erasure of the East Indian. Thus, the contributors to the volume in question can be seen as endorsing the myth of merry Africa and spinning tall tales of racial identity and solidarity among Africans the world over. They are unequivocal in their claim that Africa is the cradle of human civilization and the source of ancient human history. In spite of these facts, however, contemporary history is said to be written and produced by white supremacist barbarians bent on erasing the major contributions of Africans. Thus, Alleyne-Dettmers essentializes ‘barbaric Europeans’ (2000, 139), and both Smart (2000b, 199) and Moran (2000, 174) condemn what they refer to generally as ‘European barbarism’, while Olaogun Adeyinka speaks more specifically of the ‘heroic struggles of Africans’ to liberate themselves ‘from Spanish, French and British barbarism’ (2000, 111). Patricia Moran wants to rewrite history for she fears that there is a conspiracy on the part of what she calls ‘white bandits’ and those ‘Aryan marauders’ (p. 175), who, even today, would steal ‘we thing’, which is carnival and steelband! In the assertion of an absolute African identity there is the absolute erasure of the East Indian and other ethnic groups that comprise the society. As the foregoing assessment of Smart and Nehusi (2000) suggests, in the public’s mind, the term Caribbean brings immediately to mind the English-speaking countries of the region and their African-descended populations. Somewhat less immediate are the Spanish-speaking countries of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. Even less immediate are the French countries (provinces) of Martinique and Guadeloupe, and the independent, French-speaking country of Haiti. Then there is the almost forgotten, erased, Caribbean: the Dutch-speaking Netherlands Antilles and Suriname. Although scholarship on the Caribbean has devoted considerable attention to the situation of East Indians in Trinidad and Guyana, and their erasure at the hands of both the colonial authorities and the various ‘black’ governments that inherited the seats of power following independence, not much is known about their counterparts in Suriname and other parts of the Dutch Caribbean. In fact, when addressing Caribbean studies generally, Suriname and the other countries of the Netherlands Antilles are usually an  afterthought; a curious appendage of the better-known English- and Spanish-speaking Caribbean. This leads to an incomplete picture of the region for if one were to assess the situation of the East Indians in the Caribbean, the Surinamese case seems to parallel that of Trinidad and Guyana, but the lessons learned in the latter were lost on the former. Indeed, in the years leading up to Suriname’s independence (1975), the East Indian population had the same fears and misgivings as their counterparts in Trinidad and Guyana a decade and a half earlier. And if political independence in these two countries was black in complexion, the social and political erasure of their East Indian populations could be expected to be repeated in Suriname. Thus, Gert Oostindie and Inge Klinkers wrote that: ‘quietly the Hindustani population were only afraid that those who would receive independence (i.e. the Afro-Surinamese) would use this for the enlargement of their own political power’ (2003, 112). As a consequence the East Indians generally opposed independence and opted for continued colonial dependence on the Dutch (p. 103, 112). For Oostindie and Klinkers (2003), then, this is only one reason why any comprehensive attempt to understand the history and sociology of the Caribbean must include the contributions that the Dutch countries have made to the shaping of the region’s wider culture and politics. Yet one must not homogenize all the Dutch countries, for Suriname and Aruba, for example, are quite politically, socially and culturally distinct. And whereas the sentiments of ‘black power’ informed the political sensibilities of Curaà §ao’s population, the ‘political elites of Aruba had always tended to emphasise the Euro-Amerinidian roots of their island as opposed to the African character of Curaà §ao’ (2003, 122). Indeed, as these authors point out, after losing Indonesia the Dutch lost most of their appetite for empire and appeared to retain their Caribbean possessions only reluctantly. And after the independence of Suriname, an  unusual situation was presented whereby the mother country seemed willing to free itself from the responsibilities of Empire, but the colonies in question would not let them off the hook (p. 116, 145). This is reminiscent of what Rosemarijn Hoefte and Gert Oostindie call ‘an example of upside-down decolonization with the metropolis, not the former colonies, pressing for independence’ (1991, 93). As Oostindie and Klinkers convincingly argue, whereas in the British West Indies (BWI) the sentiment for independence was strong in the 1950s and 1960s, this was not the case in the French West Indies and the Dutch West Indies (2003, 46-7). Suriname was the exception, but it was continental and not part of the socalled Antilles or Netherlands Antilles. In the case of the United States, Puerto Rico was a mixed bag with a significant proportion desiring statehood and an equal number preferring the continuation of the status quo, while an insignificant minority has always favoured independence. The US Virgin Islands, on the other hand, has never had any pretensions at independence of any kind. What is most striking about all these non-sovereign Caribbean states today (the remaining British Overseas Territories, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands, St. Martin, Martinique and Guadeloupe, Curaà §ao, St. Maarten, Saba, St. Eustatius, Bonaire and Aruba), is that they have a higher standar d of living than the independent states, which leads some to make the perverse claim for continued colonization. The fact of the matter, however, is that all the economies in question are almost totally subsidized by the mother countries so local or indigenous economic development is virtually nonexistent. The higher standards of living are thus quite precarious and artificial and could crash any time the colonial power decided to withdraw. This led to the obvious conclusion that because: ‘from the Dutch side, millions of guilders are pumped into the Antilles and Suriname on a yearly basis,’ it would be far more preferable that ‘today rather than tomorrow that the Netherlands would get rid of the Antilles and Suriname’ (Oostindie and Klinkers 2003, 116). But as noted by Paquet earlier, decolonization is intimately tied to identity, whether juridical or socio-cultural, and wrapped up in the complex Caribbean traditions of errantry, travel, migration and return. So following  the insights of Derek Walcott, after all the travel is over, return to home is on the agenda; but ‘home’ is a nuanced Caribbean with African sensibilities. Further, because finding self is the prerequisite to finding home (Paquet 2002, 171, 173, 186-7; Smart and Nehusi 2000), and because self- knowledge leads to self-realization (Paquet 2002, 184, 187, 191), identity and belonging are inextricably tied to (political) action. Thus, in the case of the remaining British Overseas Territories, there is the ongoing debate over citizenship, passports and legal rights that led to the clumsy creation of a category of ‘British dependent territory passport holders’. This has given rise to what Oostindie and Klinkers call a group of persons with ‘a form of paper identity’ that has turned them into ‘citizens of nowhere’ (2003, 195). The same applies to the Surinamers and other Antillean peoples, who want to retain their distinctive Caribbean cultural identities, but who, mainly for economic reasons insist on retaining Dutch passports, Dutch citizenship, and all associated rights and privileges. And just as growing economic problems (unemployment) and social problems (racial discrimination) led the British in the 1960s to restrict free movement of British subjects from the former colonies to the metropolis, the French sought to encourage economic development in Martinique and Gua deloupe in order to reduce the numbers of those emigrating to France, and The Hague has made similar attempts to limit the numbers of Surinamese and Antilleans who have claims on Dutch citizenship. Once more the parallels are compelling but the consequences of erasure prevent them from being fully grasped. Another instructive parallel that seems lost in the erasure of the Dutch Caribbean concerns the idea of regional federation or integration. When Jamaica decided to pull out of the federation of the ten British West Indian territories in 1961, Trinidad’s Eric Williams announced that 1 from 10 leaves naught, implying that the idea of federation was dead (Knight and Palmer 1989, 14-15). For their part the Dutch Antilles, which are composed  of six islands, were faced with an almost exact dilemma when Aruba was granted ‘separate status’ in 1996. With continental Suriname already independent, Aruba’s status aparte led to a virtually identical sentiment of ‘one out of six would leave nil’ (Oostindie and Klinmkers 2003, 122), and seemed to end all hope or talk of Antillean independence. Based on the forgoing it is clear to see how the Caribb ean, both historically and in contemporary times, is a political project subject to the power politics of entrenched interests, whether of a class, race or gendered nature. Further, as social groups strive to root themselves and to establish identity markers, such politics will see the erasure of some and the promotion of others. The three studies reviewed here highlight dimensions of the colonial period in the Caribbean as well as the politics of decolonization and the politics of nation building in the modern age. While recently the latter has tended to assume clear ethnic dimensions, considerations of class, race and gender are not to be minimized or ignored, for the modern Caribbean was constructed on the politics of social inequality that are directly tied their statuses as dependent capitalist satellites of imperialist centres in an increasingly globalized world. *** References Allahar, Anton L. (2003) ‘â€Å"Racing† Caribbean Political Culture: Afrocentrism, Black Nationalism and Fanonism’. In Holger Henke and Fred Reno (eds) Modern Political Culture in the Caribbean. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, pp. 21-58. Allahar, Anton L. (2004) ‘Ethnic Entrepreneurship and Nationalism in Trinidad: Afrocentrism and Hindutva’, Social and Economic Studies (53)2: 117-154. Alleyne Dettmers, Patricia (2000) ‘Beyond Borders, Carnival as Global Phenomena’. In Smart and Nehusi (eds) pp. 131-162. Boyce-Davies, Carole and Elaine Fido (eds) (1990) Out of Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Hoefte, Rosemarijn and Gert Oostindie (1991) ‘The Netherlands and the Dutch Caribbean: Dilemmas of Decolonization’. In Paul Sutton (ed.) Europe and the Caribbean. London: Macmillan, pp. 71-98. Knight, Franklin W. and Colin S. Palmer (eds) (1989) The Modern Caribbean. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Lamming, George (1960) The Pleasures of Exile. London: Michael Joseph. Moran, Patricia (2000) ‘Experiencing the Pan African Dimension of Carnival’. In Smart and Nehusi (eds) pp. 163-78. Nehusi, Kimani S. K. (2000a) ‘Going back home to the Carnival’. In Smart and Nehusi (eds) pp. 1-16. ––– (2000b) ‘The Origins of Carnival: Notes from a Preliminary Investigation’. In Smart and Nehusi (eds) pp. 77-103. Nehusi, K.S.K.; and Olaogun Narmer Adeyinka (2000) ‘A Carnival of Resistance, Emancipation, Commemoration, Reconstruction, and Creativity’. In Smart and Nehusi (eds) pp. 105-129. Oostindie, Gert and Inge Klinkers (2003) Decolonising the Caribbean: Dutch policies in a comparative perspective. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Paquet, Sandra Pouchet (2002) Caribbean Autobiography: cultural identity and self-representation. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. Reddock, Rhoda E. (ed.) (1996) Ethnic Minorities in Caribbean Society. St. Augustine, Trinidad: ISER. Smart, Ian I. and Kimani S. K. Nehusi (eds) (2000) Ah Come Back Home: Perspectives on the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival. Washington: Original World Press. Smart, Ian I. (2000a) ‘Carnival, the Ultimate Pan-African Festival’. In Smart and Nehusi (eds) pp. 2976. ––– (2000b) ‘It’s not French (Europe), It’s really French-based Creole (Africa)’. In Smart and Nehusi (eds) pp. 197-221. Springer, Pearl Eintou (2000) ‘Carnival: Identity, Ethnicity and Spirituality’. In Smart and Nehusi (eds) pp. 17-28. Trotman, David V. (1991) ‘The image of Indians in Calypso: Trinidad 1946-1986’. In Selwyn Ryan (ed.) Social and Occupational Stratification in Trinidad and Tobago. St. Augustine, Trinidad: ISER, pp. 385-98.

Nietzsche on Power

The rise of science placed a strain on religion’s ability to retain its credence. Science had demonstrated an unprecedented ability to explain concepts that were once mysteries. This ability began to efface the dominion and power of the Christian God, and this led to the existentialist idea that man lives alone in the world and must rely only on himself. According to Nietzsche, this occurrence places power squarely in the hands of man, and the possession of this power leaves him with the ability to exert it over himself as well as others. One of the main ideas behind Nietzsche’s works is that the human individual constantly intends and strives toward wielding this power over others.Even actions that appear altruistic are really sparked by a rooted desire to control the person for whom the act is performed. Nietzsche advocates the fundamental egoism of all persons, declaring the focus of all human conceptions to be centered on the desire of that particular individual to dominate in a given situation. Even the evolutionary aspects of man’s position within the environment manifests the individual’s need to wield power: growth from youth to adulthood involves an increase of power and a decrease in subordination; the desire for upward social mobility represents this as well.According to Nietzsche, the need for power is an instinctive drive that is the end for which all pleasure-seeking actions strive. Yet Nietzsche also identified a need that humans have to control themselves—and this he conceived as the desire for internal power. Here is where Nietzsche’s truest interest in power lay. These themes can be demonstrated in his use of aphorisms and elaborations of these throughout his works Daybreak, the Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, and the Will to Power.The Judeo-Christian antagonism (indeed the antagonism of all religions) represents one example on earth of the power relations (struggle) of which Nietzsche writes. In Da ybreak, he writes: â€Å"the ship of Christianity threw overboard a good deal of its Jewish ballast† (40). Ironically, the idea represented in the aphorism â€Å"God is dead† describes the modern scientific supplanting of the Judeo-Christian view that God is ultimately responsible for the molding of the individual (Zupancic, 6).The scientific explanations of the universe—the Copernican revolution which challenged and toppled the geocentric view—weakened the idea that the anthropomorphic God was any longer (or ever was) in charge of the destiny of the universe. Essentially one of Nietzsche’s â€Å"power relations,† this struggle left each individual entity on the earth dependent on its own actions to take it through time. This has become one of the catalytic ideas that gave birth to the notion of internal power that drives man. This power has been expressed by Nietzsche in the form of self mastery, which develops in a complicated cycle, both as a result of and in accordance with the instinct. Though this important instinct arises out of the inward self-creation of the man, Nietzsche also acknowledges another type of instinct that drives men toward a different kind of power: domination.In the work The Will to Power Nietzsche points out the symbolism that can be found in the how states and societies have been constituted. The drive for power, he writes, undergirds the hierarchical nature of the organizations within each state. Societal classes demonstrate ways in which people have succeeded in gaining power over others.This again identifies another concrete example of power relations within the human world. The members of higher classes (which have acquired wealth) dominate in a situation where the other members of society look to them for their wages. Money represents buying power, without which people cannot live. By this reasoning, individuals who acquire their wages from these powerful members of the upper class look toward these moguls for their very sustenance. This is the manifestation of the power that, according to Nietzsche, all men instinctively seek.Yet even in this example where people appear to seek mastery over others, one can detect an example of the desire for internal power. Persons who must do the bidding of the rich in order to gain hold of the buying power that facilitates their continued existence—these persons recognize that others exert power over them. Their desire for upward mobility represents a desire to have that control returned to them, and this appears to be possible only simultaneously with having the power to control others. This can thus be seen as a dual drive toward dominance and independence.In Nietzsche’s opinion it is this self-mastery that represents the truest power. The picture of the ascetic monk who denies himself physical and aesthetic pleasures for the purpose of subduing his desires and mastering himself demonstrates more power than the w arriors who plunder other tribes and nations. On a deeper level, Nietzsche describes the inner workings of the human mind as a conflict of several wills that compete for power within the individual.He writes the following: â€Å"Suppose nothing else were ‘given’ as real except our world of desires and passions, and we could   not get down, or up, to any other ‘reality’ besides the reality of our drives–for thinking is merely a relation of these drives to each other† (Beyond, 36). People’s wills (or desires) often conflict with each other, and thoughts, Nietzsche explains, are the vehicles of the desires; it is via thought that desires identify themselves, and the mind is their battlefield. The ability to master oneself is essentially the ability of one thought to rise up and become the dominant will, mastering all the others.Nietzsche expresses this idea also in his book Beyond Good and Evil, the title of which is essentially a descri ption of the heights attained by those who have achieved the highest level of self mastery. He writes that such a person becomes â€Å"the man Beyond Good and Evil, the master of his virtues, the superabundant of will† (Beyond, 212). His will to create himself overflows, and he finds his own way toward morality and virtue through his own journey of self discovery.This journey involves a complex interplay of consciousness, subconsciousness, and instinct. Instinct comes about through a process in which consciousness of the outside world gathers knowledge that is taken in and absorbed into the mind in a kind of internalization process. The depth at which these internalized principles rest within the individual causes them to rank higher than the prevailing principles of the day. And the fact that the individual creates them him/herself places him or her in the powerful position of self-master.The hierarchical nature of the instincts themselves determines a way in which Nietzsche classes men according to their degree of control over themselves. The person who has attained an existence beyond good and evil is said to be supramoral, and this is the one who has fortified his internal power. It is in comparison to this person that Nietzsche is driven to classify lesser men. Such men are those who might be seen as stuck in the routines of life. They are bound by a herding instinct that is inherited rather than created.This hereditary instinct comes into the possession of not one but a plethora of individuals whose behaviors begin to demonstrate that they can no longer accurately be called individuals. They possess no mastery over themselves that allows them to create their own being with its own virtues and morals to dictate or inform their actions. Instead, their actions and motives are carbon copies of a million others who have, like themselves, passively accepted the norms of their society.Nietzsche’s idea of self-mastery and individualism is again mad e visible in his declaration that societies have caused passions to be laid to rest, whereas individuals who have distinguished themselves by developing internal power have contributed to the progress of the human race. He expresses this idea in the passage,Nowadays there is a profoundly erroneous moral doctrine that is celebrated especially in England: this holds that judgements of ‘good' and ‘evil' sum up experiences of what is ‘expedient' and ‘inexpedient.' One holds that what is called good preserves the species, while what is called evil harms the species. In truth, however, the evil instincts are expedient, species-preserving, and indispensable to as high a degree as the good ones; their function is merely different (The Gay Science, 74).Even evil persons, Nietzsche explains, have done more good for humanity than society itself with all its conformity and low-tiered hierarchical power. He argues that even powerful (though evil) individuals have given ot hers something worthwhile: they have provided the means of comparing and contrasting between extremes in ways that perform dialectically to take knowledge and morals to higher heights. These persons who have instinctively created their own morals through a systematic mastery of themselves give more power to humanity than those who conform and expend no energy in the pursuit of more powerful selves. The empowered individuals have done this through adding to the variety of knowledge (of good and evil) and creating new avenues and alternatives for self-mastering persons.Nietzsche’s regard for what he considered the power of the self-mastering individual eclipsed that of what he viewed as the general power struggle that often ensued from power relations. The self-made individual demonstrates an industry through which he is able to create his own morals and fabricate the instinct that will lead him toward those morals. Such a man Nietzsche considers to have transcended good and ev il by entering into a morality created at first through consciousness, but later sublimely through the subconscious. This man, in Nietzsche’s opinion, has truly achieved power of a type that goes beyond the mere control of others, as it has attained the much more difficult goal of self-control.Works CitedNietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. 1886. trans. R.J. Hollingdale. New York:    Penguin, 1973.Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. (Cambridge Texts in the History    of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.The Gay Science: with a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. New York:    Vintage/Random House, 1974.The Will to Power. 1888. trans. Walter Kaufman and R.J. Hollingdale. New York:   Ã‚   Vintage Books, 1967.Zupancic, Alenka. The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two (Short Circuits). Cambridge: MIT, 2003 Nietzsche on Power The rise of science placed a strain on religion’s ability to retain its credence. Science had demonstrated an unprecedented ability to explain concepts that were once mysteries. This ability began to efface the dominion and power of the Christian God, and this led to the existentialist idea that man lives alone in the world and must rely only on himself. According to Nietzsche, this occurrence places power squarely in the hands of man, and the possession of this power leaves him with the ability to exert it over himself as well as others. One of the main ideas behind Nietzsche’s works is that the human individual constantly intends and strives toward wielding this power over others.Even actions that appear altruistic are really sparked by a rooted desire to control the person for whom the act is performed. Nietzsche advocates the fundamental egoism of all persons, declaring the focus of all human conceptions to be centered on the desire of that particular individual to dominate in a given situation. Even the evolutionary aspects of man’s position within the environment manifests the individual’s need to wield power: growth from youth to adulthood involves an increase of power and a decrease in subordination; the desire for upward social mobility represents this as well. According to Nietzsche, the need for power is an instinctive drive that is the end for which all pleasure-seeking actions strive. Yet Nietzsche also identified a need that humans have to control themselves—and this he conceived as the desire for internal power. Here is where Nietzsche’s truest interest in power lay. These themes can be demonstrated in his use of aphorisms and elaborations of these throughout his works Daybreak, the Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, and the Will to Power.The Judeo-Christian antagonism (indeed the antagonism of all religions) represents one example on earth of the power relations (struggle) of which Nietzsche writes. In D aybreak, he writes: â€Å"the ship of Christianity threw overboard a good deal of its Jewish ballast† (40). Ironically, the idea represented in the aphorism â€Å"God is dead† describes the modern scientific supplanting of the Judeo-Christian view that God is ultimately responsible for the molding of the individual (Zupancic, 6). The scientific explanations of the universe—the Copernican revolution which challenged and toppled the geocentric view—weakened the idea that the anthropomorphic God was any longer (or ever was) in charge of the destiny of the universe.Essentially one of Nietzsche’s â€Å"power relations,† this struggle left each individual entity on the earth dependent on its own actions to take it through time. This has become one of the catalytic ideas that gave birth to the notion of internal power that drives man. This power has been expressed by Nietzsche in the form of self mastery, which develops in a complicated cycle, both as a result of and in accordance with the instinct. Though this important instinct arises out of the inward self-creation of the man, Nietzsche also acknowledges another type of instinct that drives men toward a different kind of power: domination.In the work The Will to Power Nietzsche points out the symbolism that can be found in the how states and societies have been constituted. The drive for power, he writes, undergirds the hierarchical nature of the organizations within each state. Societal classes demonstrate ways in which people have succeeded in gaining power over others. This again identifies another concrete example of power relations within the human world. The members of higher classes (which have acquired wealth) dominate in a situation where the other members of society look to them for their wages. Money represents buying power, without which people cannot live. By this reasoning, individuals who acquire their wages from these powerful members of the upper class loo k toward these moguls for their very sustenance. This is the manifestation of the power that, according to Nietzsche, all men instinctively seek.Yet even in this example where people appear to seek mastery over others, one can detect an example of the desire for internal power. Persons who must do the bidding of the rich in order to gain hold of the buying power that facilitates their continued existence—these persons recognize that others exert power over them. Their desire for upward mobility represents a desire to have that control returned to them, and this appears to be possible only simultaneously with having the power to control others. This can thus be seen as a dual drive toward dominance and independence.In Nietzsche’s opinion it is this self-mastery that represents the truest power. The picture of the ascetic monk who denies himself physical and aesthetic pleasures for the purpose of subduing his desires and mastering himself demonstrates more power than the warriors who plunder other tribes and nations. On a deeper level, Nietzsche describes the inner workings of the human mind as a conflict of several wills that compete for power within the individual.He writes the following: â€Å"Suppose nothing else were ‘given’ as real except our world of desires and passions, and we could   not get down, or up, to any other ‘reality’ besides the reality of our drives–for thinking is merely a relation of these drives to each other† (Beyond, 36). People’s wills (or desires) often conflict with each other, and thoughts, Nietzsche explains, are the vehicles of the desires; it is via thought that desires identify themselves, and the mind is their battlefield. The ability to master oneself is essentially the ability of one thought to rise up and become the dominant will, mastering all the others.Nietzsche expresses this idea also in his book Beyond Good and Evil, the title of which is essentially a desc ription of the heights attained by those who have achieved the highest level of self mastery. He writes that such a person becomes â€Å"the man Beyond Good and Evil, the master of his virtues, the superabundant of will† (Beyond, 212). His will to create himself overflows, and he finds his own way toward morality and virtue through his own journey of self discovery.This journey involves a complex interplay of consciousness, subconsciousness, and instinct. Instinct comes about through a process in which consciousness of the outside world gathers knowledge that is taken in and absorbed into the mind in a kind of internalization process. The depth at which these internalized principles rest within the individual causes them to rank higher than the prevailing principles of the day. And the fact that the individual creates them him/herself places him or her in the powerful position of self-master.The hierarchical nature of the instincts themselves determines a way in which Nietzsc he classes men according to their degree of control over themselves. The person who has attained an existence beyond good and evil is said to be supramoral, and this is the one who has fortified his internal power. It is in comparison to this person that Nietzsche is driven to classify lesser men. Such men are those who might be seen as stuck in the routines of life.They are bound by a herding instinct that is inherited rather than created. This hereditary instinct comes into the possession of not one but a plethora of individuals whose behaviors begin to demonstrate that they can no longer accurately be called individuals. They possess no mastery over themselves that allows them to create their own being with its own virtues and morals to dictate or inform their actions. Instead, their actions and motives are carbon copies of a million others who have, like themselves, passively accepted the norms of their society.Nietzsche’s idea of self-mastery and individualism is again m ade visible in his declaration that societies have caused passions to be laid to rest, whereas individuals who have distinguished themselves by developing internal power have contributed to the progress of the human race. He expresses this idea in the passage,Nowadays there is a profoundly erroneous moral doctrine that is celebrated especially in England: this holds that judgements of ‘good' and ‘evil' sum up experiences of what is ‘expedient' and ‘inexpedient.' One holds that what is called good preserves the species, while what is called evil harms the species. In truth, however, the evil instincts are expedient, species-preserving, and indispensable to as high a degree as the good ones; their function is merely different (The Gay Science, 74).Even evil persons, Nietzsche explains, have done more good for humanity than society itself with all its conformity and low-tiered hierarchical power. He argues that even powerful (though evil) individuals have given others something worthwhile: they have provided the means of comparing and contrasting between extremes in ways that perform dialectically to take knowledge and morals to higher heights. These persons who have instinctively created their own morals through a systematic mastery of themselves give more power to humanity than those who conform and expend no energy in the pursuit of more powerful selves. The empowered individuals have done this through adding to the variety of knowledge (of good and evil) and creating new avenues and alternatives for self-mastering persons.Nietzsche’s regard for what he considered the power of the self-mastering individual eclipsed that of what he viewed as the general power struggle that often ensued from power relations. The self-made individual demonstrates an industry through which he is able to create his own morals and fabricate the instinct that will lead him toward those morals. Such a man Nietzsche considers to have transcended good and evil by entering into a morality created at first through consciousness, but later sublimely through the subconscious. This man, in Nietzsche’s opinion, has truly achieved power of a type that goes beyond the mere control of others, as it has attained the much more difficult goal of self-control.Works CitedNietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. 1886. trans. R.J. Hollingdale. New York:   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Penguin, 1973.—. Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. (Cambridge Texts in the History   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.—. The Gay Science: with a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. New York:    Vintage/Random House, 1974.—. The Will to Power. 1888. trans. Walter Kaufman and R.J. Hollingdale. New York:   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Vintage Books, 1967.Zupancic, Alenka. The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two (Short   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Ci rcuits). Cambridge: MIT, 2003

An Analysis of a favourite Grace Nichols Poem Fear Essays

An Analysis of a favourite Grace Nichols Poem Fear Essays An Analysis of a favourite Grace Nichols Poem Fear Paper An Analysis of a favourite Grace Nichols Poem Fear Paper Essay Topic: poem As the essay title states I am going to analyse a Poem written by Grace Nichols. Grace was born in Georgetown, Guyana, when finished school she went to university and then had several jobs before moving to England in 1977. Nichols then wrote poems mainly about racially sensitive topics, motherhood and sexuality. The poem, which I shall analyse, is called Fear. The main storyline in this poem is that a woman is worried and fears for her child living in England. I think this poem has a deeper meaning, basically about black people trying to adapt or not accepting the fact that they have to adapt to the way in which white people live. The writer of this poem sees it as blacks against whites, she feels very uncomfortable living in England, and maybe she feels out of place? Out numbered? In this poem there is much racial tension as she does not see the population to be as one, as equals. She uses words like our culture, and your own. This clearly shows that she sees white coloured people as being different to blacks. I think that she sees the world population split into two black people against the rest of the world. In fear there is a big culture clash and this is what Grace Nichols wants us to think about. The culture clash is the main theme running through this poem. In the first two lines of this poem our culture rub skin and against your own, we can see here that the technique used is enjambment. In these two lines we see the first signs of a tension felt by Grace Nichols between the two cultures. We know this because of several words, firstly our here we can see that Grace is sectioning her culture off, to make it us against them. Then on the next line we see against, this highlights a sense of difference, so in a different country and not around her own people. The word your suggests that she thinks she is not included in the white community or she is on the outside. From these first two lines of the poem we can see that Grace feels great tension between the two cultures and we know she feels that she is not one of us. The theme does not just occur in fear but also occurs in the other poems in which Grace Nichols has written. In two old black men on a Leicester square park bench, we also see this culture clash, these men feel unwanted in England and so lament about there homeland making themselves think that London is such a bad place to live and that the Caribbean is more like heaven. To want to go back to the Caribbean so much they must feel that blacks are unwanted and are not treat as equals. The theme in fear continues throughout the poem because we can see it in the last two lines as well as the first two, I think my childs too loving and for this fear here again we see that the technique used is enjambment and the effect that this has is that it makes us think about the two lines as one. We see a culture clash in these two lines, again, because of specific words, which have been used. Firstly my, when she uses this word, we see that she is sectioning herself of from anybody else. Everyone loves their child very much but I think that Grace Nichols thinks that her love for her child is better than anyone elses. When she says too loving I get the feeling that she has replaced the word loving from good, she thinks because she is black and living in England her life is so much more difficult than an average white coloured persons life, and therefore her child should not need to go through what she has been through. She thinks her child is too good to live in England because the majority of the population are not black and therefore her baby will not be accepted and treat as an equal in this country. I will now analyse the mood and atmosphere in this poem, and try to show the feelings of the reader. In fear I feel that the mood is very uncomfortable because we are reading about someone who is not content with everyday life of living in England. As we are English citizens who are reading this poem, we obviously do not agree with what Grace Nichols thinks and because we are content with the everyday life of living in England this I think therefore makes the mood and atmosphere very uncomfortable. Another way in which this poem could be said as being uncomfortable is in the way Grace Nichols feels. It is obvious she is uncomfortable with the fact that she is living in England and this therefore makes the mood and atmosphere of the poem uncomfortable. Ask, are you going back sometime? This quote is one, which shows the atmosphere and mood, it does this by almost suggesting she is not wanted. Grace Nichols feels as if this question is what us white people are always thinking, as if we feel that she doesnt belong here which shows a sense of being uncomfortable. When the reader reads this poem they are almost forced not to agree or accept the point that Grace Nichols is putting across. She is basically saying that blacks are not accepted in England, which would therefore make us racist. When the reader realizes what Grace is saying, we think she is prejudice because she thinks all whites dont accept blacks, she does not know all white people and so therefore is prejudging many of us. When reading this I am sure many readers feel anger. The reason for this is that many readers will feel Grace is prejudice. And here? Here this quote in particular may make readers feel anger and the reason for this is that Grace dismisses the thought of London straight away. She has just described her homeland and in the next stanza she does not bother to compare it to London. Here is repeated to create the effect of dismissing the thought of London and that she obviously doesnt have much positive to say about the city. So therefore when readers from this city or country read this line they may feel great anger towards the writer, as she cannot say one decent thing about London. In the next section of this essay I am going to try to analyse how the poem is written and the way in which the language is used. To do this I shall pick out interesting words and phrases from the poem and describe what effect they have on the poem. When reading this poem several times, one of the most noticeable lines is home is where the heart lies this is very interesting because it could have two different meanings. In this line Grace has been very clever and left spaces to emphasise the word lies. This word could mean one of two things, lies as in where the heart rests or lies as in not telling the truth. If taken as where the heart rests then the author is conveying a sense of homesickness. If taken in the sense that at home the heart doesnt tell the truth then we know that Grace is feeling no homesickness at all. Personally I think the author is feeling homesickness and so when writing this line meant it to be where the heart can rest. Obviously the heart never rests, otherwise the author would be dead but in this line the word heart is a metaphor and stands for feelings, emotions and soul. In relating this line back to the whole poem I feel that because of the authors homesickness, this could be a reason why she has such a dislike for England, she misses her homeland too much and England just cant match up to the place where she feels most comfortable. This technique of writing a line in which can be taken as two different meanings does not just occur in this poem. In other poems that Grace Nichols has wrote we see her leaving the reader with several options to think about. For example in the poem childhood the line half stunned I watched is a line in which could be taken as two different meanings. From earlier lines in the poem we know that a little girl is watching a fish being killed, but when coming to this particular line is it the fish which is half stunned or is it the little girl who is half stunned? So here we can see that Grace obviously finds this technique effective in her writing and uses it in more than just one poem. Another line in which I found to be intriguing was You say youre civilised, in this line I get the impression that a bit of sarcasm is used. When writing this line does Grace Nichols mean she has seen no sign of civilisation yet from the English people or does she mean that we are civilised people but that isnt enough for her, she wants something more than civilisation. On the word You emphasis has been used by using a capital letter, this maybe suggests that she is directing this phrase at a particular person and if this is correct it suggests anger towards this person. If anger is shown to somebody then does this not mean that the narrator isnt being civilised? Someone might even say she has contradicted herself in this line. I think that when Grace Nichols wrote this line she was almost asking a question of the white community. When telling us we say that we say we are civilised she is wondering where this civilisation is because she feels like she is not treat as an equal in England. Almost challenging the white people to come out and prove that they are civilised and prove that Grace Nicholss opinion of England and her opinion of white people in England is wrong. When looking at the four lines in the fifth stanza we can see that Grace is talking and reminiscing about her homeland. I come from a backyard Where the sun reaches down Mangoes fall to the ground In the first two lines here we see the technique of enjambment. In this first line I come from a backyard in using the word I she wants us to feel sorry for her. This line is fairly easy to understand and is just saying that she has never really had a luxurious life and has always been from a poor family with little money. This is probably one of the reasons why she moved to England, she would be able to receive more income. When linking this line with the second line where the sun reaches down we can see that by using the technique of enjambment, another language technique is used. This is personification, and this is because Grace is trying to show that the sun reaches down into her backyard. So therefore the sun is picking her country above all others, so she thinks her country is special. As well as personification this line is also a metaphor because the sun does not actually reach down. I think Grace likes to see herself as a special person from a special country because on the next line there is more use of personification. mangoes fall to the ground in this line Grace is showing the reader that the idea of exotic fruits pick this country out as the sun did. Her country is special because they get excess amounts of mangoes and other countries get no exotic fruit falling to their ground at all. In these three lines in which I have just analysed we can see that Grace is very proud of her country and thinks that it is special. The structure of these three lines is also important when reading the poem. Grace firstly tells us that her country is poor so we therefore will feel sorry for her; she then says that the sun picks this country above all others to be hot and then she lets us know that exotic fruits drop on the ground of this particular country. These three lines are structured this way because if the first line was not first then the technique of enjambment could not be used and if this technique was not used then we would not look at the second line as being personification. So if these two techniques were not used in this section of the poem then these lines would have less significance and not have a deeper meaning, so we can conclude that this poem writing was good because she used the words that she had in the best possible way. I find this poem to be very interesting and intriguing and this is the main reason why I chose to do my essay on it. There are many interesting lines which have a deeper meaning that what is wrote on the surface, for example home is where the heart lies, in this line I saw much opportunity to expand on what Grace is trying to say, there is a much more deeper, sensitive meaning to this line. To have an opinion on this poem I think that you would have had to maybe spend some of your childhood living in Grace Nichols homeland because at least then you might understand where she is coming from in some lines. For example I think my child is too loving for this fear what fear? I understand that she is worried that her child will not be accepted in England but she says it as if all white people are going to murder black people the second they step outside, when we and her both know that this is not true. This is why I find it hard to have an opinion on the poem because if maybe I had grown up with Grace in this wonderful special country that she describes, then I might understand a bit more about this so called fear that she has. I chose this poem above the rest because as I stated before I saw many lines with deeper meanings and I feel it was a more personal poem than the rest. The feelings in this poem are real feelings that someone feels and I wanted to try and find out why she felt this way. I now have a better understanding of her feelings. This poem was my favourite because I felt it had more meaning than the others and a more interesting way of expressing the authors feelings.

Annimals being promiscuous essays

Annimals being promiscuous essays According to Websters dictionary, promiscuous can be defined as having sexual relations frequently with different partners and being indiscriminate in the choice of sexual partners. Christa Hohoff, Kerstin Franzen, and Norbert Sachser believe that in the yellow-toothed cavy (Galea musteloides), it is the females choice to be actively promiscuous. They feel so because females will receive benefits such as paternal care and protection from predators. Females will also increase their chances of producing a viable offspring and decrease their chances of being fertilized by a genetically incompatible male. This hypothesis is interesting because as humans, promiscuity is against the social norm, especially for a female because it leads to disease and unwanted offspring. But in a species such as the yellow-toothed cavy, females can be rewarded with such actions. The authors used several methods in order to obtain results. For the experiment the used 12 male and 12 female yellow toothed cavies were used for 12 different mating tests. Each female had a choice between four males to mate. The cavies were put in a mate choice apparatus that prevented monopolization and the harassment of females by the males. The mate choice apparatus was divided into five compartments; a central compartment for the female and four separate adjacent champers for the males. The female compartment was linked to each male compartment through a small passage, but there was no direct passage between the male compartments. The apparatus had a counter and video camera so the number of times the female entered the males compartment and the type of behavior could be recorded. Each mating test lasted for 3.5 days. On the first day, only the female was placed in the apparatus with all the doors open so she could get accustomed to the different chambers. On the se cond day, the four males were added to their respective compartments but the doors w...