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Bringing Down The House: Gambling, Speculation And The Making Of The Small Investor In Colonial India, 1867-1943
Get PDFBRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE: GAMBLING, SPECULATION AND THE MAKING OF THE SMALL INVESTOR IN COLONIAL INDIA, 1867-1943Baishakh Chakrabarti Projit Mukharji Daud Ali
My dissertation uses the history of gambling and speculation to narrate the growth of commodity exchanges and markets that emerged in colonial India during the early twentieth century and the clientele they attracted. My project intervenes in a number of major existing debates in the histories of law and governmentality, finance and political economy and ‘vernacular’ knowledge and networks of circulation in South Asia. Existing works in these fields have tended to depict state engagements with practices such as ‘commodity speculation’ and ‘gambling’ within a framework of ‘colonial governmentality’, ‘market rationality’ and the ‘legal standardization’ of market behavior. By closely following the anti-gaming laws of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this dissertation moves beyond the regulative ideals of colonial policing and interrogates the actual operations of colonial laws, their anxieties and the inconsistent categories they generated. In the process, I historicize the shifting definitions regarding native gambling, which passed through multiple regimes of legal classifications during this period. I show how the practice of gambling, which earlier corresponded to precise legal definitions became undefined when commercial actors and native business communities became its major practitioners. Additionally, the project reveals the impact of extra-legal, normative discourses that transformed the once criminalized ‘petty gambler’ into the ‘useful’ ‘small investor’. While the histories of twentieth century Indian capitalism have focused largely on the contributions of large business houses and post-colonial state planning, my dissertation accounts for the tactics that helped liberate petty capital away from ‘savings’ and redirected them towards risky speculation. I do so by showing how the prognostic literature of astro-meteorological weather manuals that predicted the chances of rainfall, reoriented themselves to predict the future prices of commodities like cotton, jute and grain. In doing so, they were able to turn a section of working class gamblers off the ‘rain betting’ houses of Calcutta, Delhi and Bombay and onto options and derivative markets in commodities
Racialized Patterns Of Inequality In United States Birth Outcomes, 1990-2018
Get PDFLow birthweight is a pernicious public health problem that has seen little to no improvement in the United States for over 50 years. Being born low birth weight carries an increased risk of a broad range of adverse health and development outcomes and has been identified as a likely mechanism through which health and socioeconomic inequality is reproduced across generations. Racial disparities in birth weight are particularly stark. However, despite considerable attention to the issue, existing research fails to fully explain the social, institutional, and historical processes that operate to uphold racialized inequality in adverse birth outcomes. In light of recent declines in average birth weight and increases in pre-term births over recent decades, this puzzle is of particular importance to the public health and medical community, as well as to the racially minoritized populations affected by these shifts. The current dissertation approaches the problem from three different angles to better understand how racialized patterns in birth weight inequality are shaped via 1) vast shifts in the timing and level of participation in the institutions of marriage and education over time and the associated implications for racialized age patterns of low birth weight risk; 2) rapid increases in the use of obstetric interventions that have had widespread implications for the distribution of births by gestational age; and 3) the dilution of Black voting power via racialized disenfranchisement. Using standard regression techniques, classic demographic life table methods, and decomposition techniques, this dissertation finds that racialized disparities in educational attainment, exposure to obstetric intervention, and political exclusion all operate to exacerbate and/or maintain long-standing disparities in birth weight risk for racially minoritized populations. Implications of this work for future research and policy call for increased attention to the institutional and historical processes that produce racialized patterns of risk for adverse birth outcomes in Black communities
The Quantification Of Neural And Behavioral Chromatic Sensitivities
Get PDFThe first stage of human color vision is the encoding of light by the long (L), medium (M), and short (S) wavelength sensitive cone photoreceptors. These signals are subsequently recombined into three post-receptoral pathways, two chromatic opponent and one luminance. The two chromatic pathways take the difference of cone activity (L-M and S-(L+M)) and the third luminance pathway sums the cone activity (L+M). Beyond the level of these post-receptoral mechanisms, the computations performed and their location in the brain are not well characterized. Across two studies, we examined the sensitivity of the underlying chromatic mechanisms using both functional magnetic resonance imaging and psychophysics. In both types of experiments, we employ the use of ‘silent substitution’ which allows for the selective modulation of activity of cone photoreceptors, and their combinations. In the first experiment, we collected BOLD fMRI responses in human V1 to spatially uniform, temporal chromatic modulations that systematically vary in chromatic direction and contrast. From this, we found that within the LM cone contrast plane, V1 is most sensitive to L-M contrast modulations and least sensitive to L+M contrast modulations. Within V1, we observe little to no change in chromatic sensitivity as a function of eccentricity. In the subsequent experiment, we measured the temporal impulse response functions associated with tracking chromatic Gabor patches and measured how the lag functions change as a function of chromatic direction and contrast, confined to the LS cone contrast plane. We measured detection thresholds for stimuli matched in their spatial, temporal, and chromatic properties. We found that for both tracking and detection, within the LS cone contrast plane, the underlying mechanisms are most sensitive to L-isolating contrast modulations and least sensitive to S-isolating contrast modulations. Across all experiments, we developed color-contrast separable models that allow us to model the relative sensitivities of the chromatic mechanisms in a way that is independent from the effect of contrast. We use these models to further quantify the sensitivities of the underlying chromatic mechanisms. This work advances our understanding of human color perception and places important constraints on building more generalized models of color processing
Bureaucracies Of Removal: The Labor And Logics Of Us Immigration Courts
No full textWith the intensification of immigration enforcement, detention, and deportation in the United States in recent years, an ever-increasing number of immigrants find themselves in immigration court facing removal from the United States. As the site where immigration judges and prosecutors decide who will be deported and who can remain in the United States, the immigration court is an important, yet understudied, institution in the immigration enforcement bureaucracy. Situating this study at the intersection of sociolegal literatures on immigration enforcement, bureaucracies, and decision-making, each chapter of this dissertation focuses on how the judges, prosecutors, and immigration attorneys navigate the labor of removal in immigration court. Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations of these court actors, I link their bureaucratic working conditions, as well as varying professional norms, to the process and outcomes of immigration removal hearings. While illuminating the black box of immigration court workings, this project explicitly contributes to research on legal decision-making and the bureaucratic values revealed in the process of adjudicating the important public, civil, and criminal justice issue that is immigration in the United States
Feeling And Judgment In Kant
Get PDFThis dissertation examines the relationship between the power of judgment and the faculty of feeling in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment. Chapter 1 traces the development of Kant’s account of the power of judgment from the Critique of Pure Reason to the Critique of the Power of Judgment. Chapter 2 offers an account of the relationship between feeling and judgment in aesthetic judgment and defends a novel interpretation of Kantian aesthetic judgment (the “performative view”). Chapter 3 addresses the role of feeling in empirical judgment and argues that feeling can guide empirical judgment if the judging subject aims solely at attaining empirical knowledge
The Nation And Its Deviants: Global Sexology And The Racial Grammar Of Sex In Colonial India, 1870-1940
No full textThis dissertation reconfigures the historiography of modern sexology from the vantage point of colonial India. It argues that India’s encounter with the racist scientific and literary infrastructures of sexology engendered taxonomies of Indian sexual life that were grounded not in liberal understandings of subjectivity but in non-liberal grammars of racial excess. Routing the history of sexology and sexuality through the global circulation of literary and scientific forms at the turn-of-the-20th-century, I contend that while the “invention” of sexuality in Europe was enabled by iconic confessional genres like the case history, the autobiography, the novel, and the questionnaire, these genres played an oversized role in defining sexuality because they undergirded individualized liberal personhood. In colonial India, however, even as modern sexology developed from the late 19th century onwards, confessional scientific genres like the case history and the questionnaire, and parallel individualizing literary genres like the autobiography and the novel were perceived as lacking by both colonial and Indian elites because of supposedly collectivist and irrational “native” models of thought, expression, and kinship. I position this orientalist discourse of absence as an enabling fiction, one which allowed the modern Western European deviant to be read as qualitatively different from his Indian counterpart, fulsome in an individuality that was seen to be missing in the latter. Because of this presumed difference, European categories of sexual deviance—whether the homosexual, the couple, the child, or the hysteric—were not mimetically reproduced in India. Nor was an overarching Western binary between the homosexual and heterosexual seen to operate in India. Rather, a more elementary schism emerged between colonial and select bourgeois Indian elites who claimed the authority to recount sexual “truth” within these confessional genres and a litany of subaltern deviants whom they rendered untruthful, reticent, or voiceless. These latter were almost entirely represented in racialized cartographic, ethnographic, corporeal, photographic, and statistical terms, producing a modern sexological grammar that privileged “exteriority” over “interiority” as the hallmark of Indian sexual subjectivity
The Decomposing Body: Posthumanist Modernism And The Ecology Of Decay
Get PDFThis project takes its motivation from the need to theorize a subversion or decentering of the human subject that has been widely articulated across the contemporary environmental humanities. The critique of anthropocentrism, I have found, can be enriched by engaging with a strain of modernist writing about bodily breakdown and postmortem decay that mobilizes innovative techniques for confronting nonhuman entities and ecological forces that refuse neat containment within the purview of the human symbolic economy. Bodying forth death and decay in language that performatively disfigures itself and thus articulates its own impotence in the face of what resists or refuses representation, modernist writers generated an aesthetic of enmeshment amid more-than-human assemblages that exceed strictly anthropic determinations. Ultimately, I argue that Charles Baudelaire, Djuna Barnes, and Georges Bataille constitute an acutely undertheorized form of posthumanist modernism. Collectively, this tradition advances the writing of dead and decomposing bodies as a means for reorienting the ontology of the human in relation to the beings and forces that precede, traverse, and exceed the strictly anthropic
Politics In The Time Of Race
No full textThis dissertation analyzes the emergence of race in the early modern Spanish Empire, from 15th-century Iberia to 16th-century Mexico. In it, I show how race grew out of prior notions of religious difference and argue that this new, racial mode of difference prompted a transformation in European understandings of time and history. I highlight how the racialization of Indigenous peoples was connected to that of Jews, Moors, and Africans, tracing how the early development of racial ideologies worked in and through time. I begin by analyzing the events and controversies surrounding the enactment of the first blood purity statute, the Sentencia-Estatuto of 1449, which targeted Jewish converts to Christianity. I argue that it posed a fundamental challenge to the belief in the effectiveness of conversion and upended medieval understandings of Christian subjecthood. Blood purity policies subsequently informed debates regarding the nature (and thus the rights) of Indigenous peoples. The second chapter focuses on the entrenchment of those distinctions, analyzing how thinkers like Bartolomé de las Casas and Francisco de Vitoria attempted to justify the enslavement of Africans while condemning that of Indigenous peoples in the Americas. The third chapter turns to how Martín de Azpilcueta, one of their contemporaries, theorized the relationship between trade and sovereignty and argues that novel theories of just war and just prices were central to the racialization of slavery and colonization. Chapter four further explores how missionaries like Gerónimo de Mendieta, José de Acosta, and Gregorio García legitimated racial hierarchies. I look to their humoral and climatological theories of difference and argue that notions of blood purity and Iberian figures of otherness—such as Jews and Moors—were fundamental to shaping racial categories in the Americas. The final chapter details the role of race in reshaping European conceptions of time and history. Emergent notions of civilizational development took racial difference to correspond to temporal distance, with races situated as relatively more or less advanced than others. Through this, I track the ways in which time has become a significant site of political struggle
A Systematic Analysis Of The Concordance Between Chromatin Accessibility And Gene Expression Changes
Get PDFA major goal in the field of transcriptional regulation is the mapping of changes in the binding of transcription factors to the resultant changes in gene expression. Recently, methods for measuring chromatin accessibility have enabled us to measure changes in accessibility across the genome, which are thought to correspond to transcription factor binding events. In concert with RNA-sequencing, these data in principle enable such mappings; however, few studies have looked at their concordance over short duration treatments with specific perturbations. Here, we used tandem, bulk ATAC-seq and RNA-seq measurements from MCF-7 breast carcinoma cells to systematically evaluate the concordance between changes in accessibility and changes in expression in response to retinoic acid and TGF-β. We found two classes of genes whose expression showed a significant change: those that showed some change in accessibility of nearby chromatin, and those that showed virtually no change despite strong changes in expression. The peaks associated with genes in the former group had a lower baseline accessibility prior to exposure to signal. Analysis of paired chromatin accessibility and gene expression data from distinct paths along the hematopoietic differentiation trajectory showed a much stronger correspondence, suggesting that the multifactorial biological processes associated with differentiation may lead to changes in chromatin accessibility that reflect rather than drive altered transcriptional status. Together, these results show many gene expression changes can happen independent of changes in accessibility of local chromatin in the context of a single-factor perturbation and suggest that some changes to accessibility changes may occur after changes to expression, rather than before.Furthermore, we establish the role of cell-intrinsic differences in clonal melanoma cell lines leading to a rare subpopulation of cells that demonstrate invasive behavior both in vitro and in vivo. This population is molecularly characterized by the high expression of SEMA3C, and knockout studies demonstrate that the formation of the invasives subpopulation is negatively regulated by the transcription factor NKX2.2. Overall, these results establish a role for non-genetic differences in important cancer attributes such as cellular invasion
The Role Of Long Noncoding Rnas In Innate Antiviral Immunity
No full textMosquito-borne viruses represent a substantial public health threat capable of causing severe, endemic disease often with few therapeutic options. To control viral replication, host cells rely on innate intracellular immune pathways including the Type I interferon (IFN) response. However, many viruses have adapted potent mechanisms to antagonize these classical antiviral pathways. To survive, the host has evolved alternative counterdefense strategies to inhibit viral replication. A growing body of evidence has recently shown that long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) play important roles in regulating innate immunity. Whether lncRNAs can also contribute to complementary antiviral defense and counterdefense responses is unclear. Using high-throughput, loss-of-function, RNAi screening, we identified two new antiviral lncRNAs: ALPHA and HAGLR. We found that ALPHA directly interacts with chikungunya virus (CHIKV) genomic RNA and impacts viral RNA replication independently of IFN-dependent signaling. These results are discussed in Chapter 2. In parallel, we also investigated the antiviral function of the conserved, endothelial cell-specific lncRNA HAGLR both in vitro and in vivo. These findings are discussed in Chapter 3. Together, these data demonstrate that lncRNAs can serve as potent antiviral effectors in a virus- and context-specific manner, adding another layer to our understanding of antiviral defense