Reclaiming Our Subjugated Truths—Using Hip Hop as a Form of Decolonizing Public Pedagogy: The Case of Didier Awadi

This paper explores how Senegalese Hip Hop pioneer, Didier Awadi, uses Hip Hop as a form of decolonizing public pedagogy that renders the contributions of Pan-African leaders visible to Africa and the world, contributions that are often omitted and vilified by mainstream history. I argue that Awadi’s work provides a strategy for reclaiming oral literature, particularly storytelling, as a legitimate way of knowing, teaching and learning history. In his album Présidents d’Afrique, Didier Awadi uses rap and traditional African music to retell the story of our resistant past through an African frame of reference. The data is comprised of (1) a one-on-one interview with Didier Awadi and (2) one song of Présidents d’Afrique that best exemplifies how his storytelling narrates notions of African histories often erased in Eurocentric history. The data is analyzed using Ruth Reviere’s five Afrocentric research criteria: “ukweli (truth), ujamaa (community), kujitoa (commitment), uhaki (justice), and utulivu (harmony)” to determine whether Didier Awadi’s stories are grounded in African knowledge

Characterization of manifolds of constant curvature by spherical curves

It is known that the so-called rotation minimizing (RM) frames allow for a simple and elegant characterization of geodesic spherical curves in Euclidean, hyperbolic, and spherical spaces through a certain linear equation involving the coefficients that dictate the RM frame motion (da Silva, da Silva in Mediterr J Math 15:70, 2018). Here, we shall prove the converse, i.e., we show that if all geodesic spherical curves on a Riemannian manifold are characterized by a certain linear equation, then all the geodesic spheres with a sufficiently small radius are totally umbilical and, consequently, the given manifold has constant sectional curvature. We also furnish two other characterizations in terms of (i) an inequality involving the mean curvature of a geodesic sphere and the curvature function of their curves and (ii) the vanishing of the total torsion of closed spherical curves in the case of three-dimensional manifolds. Finally, we also show that the same results are valid for semi-Riemannian manifolds of constant sectional curvature.Comment: To appear in Annali di Matematica Pura ed Applicat

Meson decay in the Fock-Tani Formalism

The Fock-Tani formalism is a first principle method to obtain effective interactions from microscopic Hamiltonians. Usually this formalism was applied to scattering, here we introduced it to calculate partial decay widths for mesons.Comment: Presented at HADRON05 XI. "International Conference on Hadron Spectroscopy" Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, August 21 to 26, 200

Compact vortex in a generalized Born-Infeld model

We study vortexlike solutions in a generalized Born-Infeld model. The model is driven by two distinct parameters, one which deals with the Born-Infeld term, and the other, which controls the presence of high-order power term in the covariant derivative of the Higgs field. We numerically solve the equations of motion and depict the main vortex features, for several values of the two parameters of the model. The results indicate the presence of compact vortex, when the parameter responsible for the high-order power in the derivative increases to sufficiently large values.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures; version to appear in PR

Cancer complicating systemic lupus erythematosus--a dichotomy emerging from a nested case-control study

We determined whether any individual cancers are increased or decreased in a cohort of 595 patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) followed for up to 32 years at the University College London Hospitals Lupus Clinic, looking for any associated clinical or serological factors and the prognosis after cancer diagnosis