Miscegenations of modernity: constructing european respectability and race in the Indian railway colony, 1857-1931

Abstract

From 1857 Indian railways built railway colonies to inculcate a practical mastery of middle-class domesticity solely in their European employees. These were key sites for the construction and contestation of European identity. They marked Europe and India as separate locales bounded by distinct racial typologies and gender identities. The central distinction reinforced was that between European modernity and Indian tradition. This project was complicated by the hybrid identities of Domiciled European and Eurasian railway employees, nationalist protests, and contradictions in the colonial discourse of modernity. By 1931 the racial logic of the railway colony was under threat, but its rhetorics of respectability, modernity, gender, and race intensified in new forms. By tracing the historical construction of boundaries between Europe and India and the history of interstitial groups that destabilize these, we can question the transition narratives of nationalism and capitalism that usually structure accounts of colonial history.     

Puerto Rico’s Luis Muñoz Marín: Poet,Politician, and Paradox

Some revere Luis Muñoz Marín (1898–1980); others condemn him. The author lived years of her childhood and adolescence in Puerto Rico, when prosperity—to a great extent the result of Luis Muñoz Marín’s leadership—promised a socioeconomic reality different from the current one. To understand his life and legacy, she interviewed in San Juan his daughter Senator Victoria Muñoz Mendoza (1940– ), spoke with professors, authors, and a spectrum of other individuals, and spent time at the archives of the Luis Muñoz Marín Foundation. The Foundation is a welcome oasis in an island where, despite its natural beauties, 21st century quandaries and traffic jams abound. Landing in the international airport named in Muñoz Marín’s honor, she heard a Puerto Rican airline employee say that today Muñoz Marín is a fish out of water.     

Blood aspiration as a vital sign detected by postmortem computed tomography imaging

Blood aspiration is a significant forensic finding. In this study, we examined the value of postmortem computed tomography (CT) imaging in evaluating findings of blood aspiration. We selected 37 cases with autopsy evidence of blood in the lungs and/or in the airways previously submitted to total-body CT scanning. The CT-images were retrospectively analyzed. In one case with pulmonary blood aspiration, biopsy specimens were obtained under CT guide for histological examination. In six cases, CT detected pulmonary abnormalities suggestive of blood aspiration, not mentioned in the autopsy reports. CT reconstructions provided additional data about the distribution and extent of aspiration. In one needle-biopsied case, the pulmonary specimens showed blood in the alveoli. We suggest the use of CT imaging as a tool complementary to traditional techniques in cases of blood aspiration to avoid misdiagnosis, to guide the investigation of lung tissue, and to allow for more evidence-based inferences on the cause of death.