Paula Barba Guerrero: In your article "The Gothic and the Politics of Race" (2014), you explain t... more Paula Barba Guerrero: In your article "The Gothic and the Politics of Race" (2014), you explain that the popularity of the gothic genre is, in part, because of its function "as a discourse on the terrors of racial otherness and racial encounter" (157). Specifically, you argue that gothic novels operate at different levels, sometimes producing discourses of racial otherness that serve to "shore up the normative" (157), but, other times, countering those hegemonic views via their depiction of horror (168). Could you perhaps comment on the uses of Gothic Horror with regards to race politics, especially considering the treatment given by law enforcement to both Black Lives Matters' protestors and, more recently, to Capitol rioters in 2021? 1 The work carried out for the writing of this interview has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of
2020 5th International Conference on Control and Robotics Engineering (ICCRE), 2020
The performance of the initialization module for any visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping... more The performance of the initialization module for any visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithm is crucial in determining the overall accuracy of the navigation solution. This paper proposes an automatic real time initialization module based on a heuristic algorithm which is a model selection method that provides robustness for both non-planar and planar initial scenes using the epipolar and homography geometry respectively. Initialization is made more robust by utilizing features comprising of lines, edges and corner points in a scene adaptive method so that there is a balance between the trade-off of computation speed and accuracy of the algorithm. The proposed algorithm has been effectively used to initialize map and showed to improve the pose estimation and tracking of the state of the art visual odometry algorithm by simulation over benchmark datasets. The executable code implementation of the proposed initialization module has been made open source publically to provide as a valuable reference for the students of SLAM at https://github.com/maazmb/LEP-Hybrid-Visual-Odometry.git.
The establishment of the Gothic as one of the prevalent artistic modes of the post-millennial per... more The establishment of the Gothic as one of the prevalent artistic modes of the post-millennial period is not something that could have been easily foreseen in the mid-twentieth century. For a long time relegated to specialist university units on Romanticism and Enlightenment literature, still heavily associated with medieval and revival architecture and certainly not in wide circulation as a term through which to describe contemporary cultural products, the Gothic underwent a seismic change during the 1980s and 1990s. The astounding effect of scholarly work, especially the pioneering books by ...
PART I: EARLY EXPRESSIONS OF BLACK GOTHIC Haunted Lands and Gothic Voices: Slave Narrative Re-wri... more PART I: EARLY EXPRESSIONS OF BLACK GOTHIC Haunted Lands and Gothic Voices: Slave Narrative Re-writings of Gothic Motifs Babo Speaks Back: White Violence, Black Resistance in Nineteenth Century Black Fiction 'The Dark Sunshine Aboveground': Questions of Progress and Migration in Ellison and Toomer PART II: BLACK GOTHIC AT MILLENIUM'S END 'What, after all, am I': The Terrors of (Collective) Identity 'Murdered By Piece-meal': The Destruction of African American Family in Beloved The Lost Voices of Tims Creek: Narrative Re-inscription in A Visitation of Spirits and 'Let the Dead Bury Their Dead'
By now critics have clearly recognized the ways in which foundational Gothic texts are rife with ... more By now critics have clearly recognized the ways in which foundational Gothic texts are rife with discourses and debates on racial otherness. Critical studies have especially revealed the conjunction of racial otherness and monstrosity in British and American Gothic Literature. However, as Toni Morrison explains in her seminal collection Playing in the Dark, the appearance of such monstrous racial others in literary texts is rarely about the actuality of the racial minority, but rather about white anxiety and self-construction. Extending that observation, this essay specifically examines how Black Gothic writers have understood and critiqued Gothic theorizations of race as participants in larger discourses which produce an uncanny whiteness. This essay even shows the ways Black Gothic writers have variously sought to re-appropriate and alter - and thereby re-theorize -- the meaning and uses of monstrosity in relation to race.
Black Diasporic Gothic can trace its origins back to the nineteenth century at the height of the ... more Black Diasporic Gothic can trace its origins back to the nineteenth century at the height of the Gothic’s appearance, when many black writers began to appropriate the genre to describe the real horrors of existence within racially oppressive and enslaving societies. However, many twenty-first-century Black Gothic texts suggest that modifying traditional Gothic monsters is not enough to create subversive work.Rather modern texts such as Jeremy Love’s Baypu (2009-10), Helen Oyeyimi’sWhite is for Witching (2009) and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) force Western readers out of their region and tradition entirely by introducing monsters from the African Diaspora, creatures recording the horror of physical and cultural theft even as they demand recognition of a pre-encounter cultural history. In each text, marginalised characters are able to recognise, define and combat monstrous assailants primarily because they exist outside of dominant ideological systems. Thus twenty-first century Black...
< 1> On a recent trip to New Orleans, LA, I visited three notable sites in the city's ... more < 1> On a recent trip to New Orleans, LA, I visited three notable sites in the city's history: the infamous slave exchange, now the site of the Omni Hotel and its attached restaurant; Congo Square, now the site of Louis Armstrong Park; and the Lower Ninth Ward, still devastated ...
Paula Barba Guerrero: In your article "The Gothic and the Politics of Race" (2014), you explain t... more Paula Barba Guerrero: In your article "The Gothic and the Politics of Race" (2014), you explain that the popularity of the gothic genre is, in part, because of its function "as a discourse on the terrors of racial otherness and racial encounter" (157). Specifically, you argue that gothic novels operate at different levels, sometimes producing discourses of racial otherness that serve to "shore up the normative" (157), but, other times, countering those hegemonic views via their depiction of horror (168). Could you perhaps comment on the uses of Gothic Horror with regards to race politics, especially considering the treatment given by law enforcement to both Black Lives Matters' protestors and, more recently, to Capitol rioters in 2021? 1 The work carried out for the writing of this interview has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of
2020 5th International Conference on Control and Robotics Engineering (ICCRE), 2020
The performance of the initialization module for any visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping... more The performance of the initialization module for any visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithm is crucial in determining the overall accuracy of the navigation solution. This paper proposes an automatic real time initialization module based on a heuristic algorithm which is a model selection method that provides robustness for both non-planar and planar initial scenes using the epipolar and homography geometry respectively. Initialization is made more robust by utilizing features comprising of lines, edges and corner points in a scene adaptive method so that there is a balance between the trade-off of computation speed and accuracy of the algorithm. The proposed algorithm has been effectively used to initialize map and showed to improve the pose estimation and tracking of the state of the art visual odometry algorithm by simulation over benchmark datasets. The executable code implementation of the proposed initialization module has been made open source publically to provide as a valuable reference for the students of SLAM at https://github.com/maazmb/LEP-Hybrid-Visual-Odometry.git.
The establishment of the Gothic as one of the prevalent artistic modes of the post-millennial per... more The establishment of the Gothic as one of the prevalent artistic modes of the post-millennial period is not something that could have been easily foreseen in the mid-twentieth century. For a long time relegated to specialist university units on Romanticism and Enlightenment literature, still heavily associated with medieval and revival architecture and certainly not in wide circulation as a term through which to describe contemporary cultural products, the Gothic underwent a seismic change during the 1980s and 1990s. The astounding effect of scholarly work, especially the pioneering books by ...
PART I: EARLY EXPRESSIONS OF BLACK GOTHIC Haunted Lands and Gothic Voices: Slave Narrative Re-wri... more PART I: EARLY EXPRESSIONS OF BLACK GOTHIC Haunted Lands and Gothic Voices: Slave Narrative Re-writings of Gothic Motifs Babo Speaks Back: White Violence, Black Resistance in Nineteenth Century Black Fiction 'The Dark Sunshine Aboveground': Questions of Progress and Migration in Ellison and Toomer PART II: BLACK GOTHIC AT MILLENIUM'S END 'What, after all, am I': The Terrors of (Collective) Identity 'Murdered By Piece-meal': The Destruction of African American Family in Beloved The Lost Voices of Tims Creek: Narrative Re-inscription in A Visitation of Spirits and 'Let the Dead Bury Their Dead'
By now critics have clearly recognized the ways in which foundational Gothic texts are rife with ... more By now critics have clearly recognized the ways in which foundational Gothic texts are rife with discourses and debates on racial otherness. Critical studies have especially revealed the conjunction of racial otherness and monstrosity in British and American Gothic Literature. However, as Toni Morrison explains in her seminal collection Playing in the Dark, the appearance of such monstrous racial others in literary texts is rarely about the actuality of the racial minority, but rather about white anxiety and self-construction. Extending that observation, this essay specifically examines how Black Gothic writers have understood and critiqued Gothic theorizations of race as participants in larger discourses which produce an uncanny whiteness. This essay even shows the ways Black Gothic writers have variously sought to re-appropriate and alter - and thereby re-theorize -- the meaning and uses of monstrosity in relation to race.
Black Diasporic Gothic can trace its origins back to the nineteenth century at the height of the ... more Black Diasporic Gothic can trace its origins back to the nineteenth century at the height of the Gothic’s appearance, when many black writers began to appropriate the genre to describe the real horrors of existence within racially oppressive and enslaving societies. However, many twenty-first-century Black Gothic texts suggest that modifying traditional Gothic monsters is not enough to create subversive work.Rather modern texts such as Jeremy Love’s Baypu (2009-10), Helen Oyeyimi’sWhite is for Witching (2009) and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) force Western readers out of their region and tradition entirely by introducing monsters from the African Diaspora, creatures recording the horror of physical and cultural theft even as they demand recognition of a pre-encounter cultural history. In each text, marginalised characters are able to recognise, define and combat monstrous assailants primarily because they exist outside of dominant ideological systems. Thus twenty-first century Black...
< 1> On a recent trip to New Orleans, LA, I visited three notable sites in the city's ... more < 1> On a recent trip to New Orleans, LA, I visited three notable sites in the city's history: the infamous slave exchange, now the site of the Omni Hotel and its attached restaurant; Congo Square, now the site of Louis Armstrong Park; and the Lower Ninth Ward, still devastated ...
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