Percy Spencer Barnhart (1881-1951) wrote his autobiography for his three children, Dana Spencer Barnhart, Barbara Barnhart Strickland and Rey Ickerson Barnhart. This copy was made from Mrs. Strickland's original copy of her father's autobiography. She loaned her copy to the Archives in April, 1984 and granted permission for us to photocopy it and add it to the archival collection.

Deborah Day, SIO Archivist, April 24, 1984

Evapotranspiration cools the land surface by consuming a large fraction of the net radiative energy at the surface. In forested regions, trees actively control the rate of transpiration by modulating stomatal conductance in response to environmental conditions, and species with different stomatal dynamics can affect the atmosphere in distinct ways. Using principal component analysis (PCA) and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) parameter estimation with direct, tree-level measurements of water use, we show that Douglas-firs (Pseudotsuga menziesii), a common evergreen needleleaf tree species in the Northern California Coast Range, decrease their transpiration sharply in the summer dry season in response to a dry root zone; and in contrast, broadleaf evergreen tree species, especially Pacific madrones (Arbutus menziesii), transpire maximally in the summer dry season because their transpiration is much less sensitive to a dry root zone and increases continually in response to increasing atmospheric evaporative demand. We scale up these tree-level observations to construct a bottom-up estimate of regional transpiration, and we use these regional estimates along with atmospheric models, one simple and one comprehensive, to quantify the potential impact of species transpiration differences on regional summertime climate. The atmospheric models suggest that these species differences in transpiration could affect the well-mixed atmospheric boundary layer temperature and humidity by 1-1.5 degrees C and 1 g/kg, respectively, and near-surface temperature and humidity by 1.5-2.5 degrees C and 2-3 g/kg, respectively. We further investigate the sensitivity of California climate to evapotranspiration by estimating the sensitivity of wind energy forecasts at a California wind farm to regional-scale perturbations in soil moisture using a regional atmospheric model. These tests show that forecasts at this particular farm are most sensitive to soil moisture in the Central Valley, and that changes in soil moisture on the order of previously-demonstrated errors in atmospheric reanalyses lead to wind energy forecast errors of 1-3 m/s, which can translate to differences in forecasted wind energy of 15-40% of a wind farm’s maximum rated power.

This dissertation examines the concept of the African Diaspora by focusing on four post-colonial Maroon communities of Jamaica, the oldest autonomous Black polities in the Caribbean, which were established by escapees from slave-holding authorities during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In exploring the Maroons as a Black community, the work looks at how they employ diaspora in making linkages to other communities of African descent and for what purposes.

Maroons are being positioned in relation to the amorphous concept of diaspora, which is normally used to refer to people who have been dispersed from their place of origins but maintain tradition and connections with kin in other countries. However, I complicate the definition, arguing that diaspora, specifically the African Diaspora, is the condition that produces the collective consciousness of sameness rooted in the idea of common African origins based on a common experience of Black abjection.

This understanding of diaspora opens the way to see that the uses of the concept are varied. This approach to diaspora challenges conventional debates in the humanities and social sciences on whether the concept is either a grouping of peoples, a process, or a method, making it possible to simultaneously engage all three modes along with their conceptual and theoretical contributions to the field of Diaspora Studies.

Most importantly, the study permits us to see how the critical practice of diaspora is articulated in communities of African descent. Here, “critical practice” refers to acts or utterances that critique, challenge, and re-position distorted understandings of particular peoples and communities. The African Diaspora seen as a critical practice ultimately challenges Western understandings of Black people. Another important concept is “articulation,” as in enunciation and making linkages, which highlights the significance, aim, and utility of the critical practice of diaspora for different Black communities. This approach to diaspora as a critical practice that explores articulation is crucial for understanding the varying responses of Black peoples to global inequality and exclusion. It creates a nuanced approach to diaspora and shows how different Black communities may engage it in their own way.

In addition, this study demonstrates how diaspora, not race, as a unit of analysis for understanding the connection of peoples who are considered Black. I view race here to be a social construct that has no biological basis. Thus, in its articulations, diaspora is not a matter of subscribing to an essentialist racial agenda, but incorporates significant differences across diverse Black peoples to fully understand their lived realities and experiences.

Furthermore, this view of diaspora permits an interdisciplinary approach to engage the fields of history, anthropology, literature, and political philosophy in the study. Such a comparative and interdisciplinary approach helps to explore systematically the significance of diaspora to Black peoples in general and at site-specific locations. In this case, it de-centers Americo-centric analysis by focusing on the Caribbean.

Overall, the dissertation, through an innovative approach, explores how Black communities, particularly Jamaican Maroons, engage diaspora. Undeniably, diaspora, as a critical practice, has contributed much from its earliest articulation and will undoubtedly continue to contribute to an enhanced understanding of Black peoples. Arguably, exploration of the critical practice and articulation of diaspora demonstrates the significance of communities of African descent engaging in endeavors for Black autonomy and sovereignty against the discourse of Black inhumanity.

Ichthyologically speaking, one of the least-explored parts of North America is Baja California. From the waters along its coast several hitherto unknown species have been collected. One of these, a very distinct kind of rockfish or scorpionfish (a member of the family Scorpaenidae) , is described in this contribution. The single specimen, a large adult, was presented to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography by the Hall-Booth Fish Company of San Diego, as Accession No. 1252. The fishermen who took this fish were not consulted, but according to information obtained from the company, the specimen was included among some "rock cod" (Sebastodes) that were caught in the Pacific Ocean off Cedros Island on May 14, 1931. The rockfish grounds off this island are on the west side, where an abundance of kelp grows on the rocky bottom in shallow water. This new scorpaenid belongs to a group that is predominantly deep-sea and tropical. It is one of the few littoral fishes of its type and is one of the northern-most outliers of a fauna that is more tropical than that of southern California. Recent exploration has shown that the shore fauna of northwestern Baja California is distinctly more northerly in its affinities than is the littoral fauna of southern California. As one goes southward from San Diego he finds only southern California fish types, plus a few central Californian species. More tropical types are first encountered in small numbers in the vicinity of Cedros Island. The new species is one of these.

My dissertation examines entanglements of race, place, gender, and class in Puerto Rican reggaetón. Based on ethnographic and archival research in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and in New York, New York, I argue that Puerto Rican youth engage with an African diasporic space via their participation in the popular music reggaetón. By African diasporic space, I refer to the process by which local groups incorporate diasporic resources such as cultural practices or icons from other sites in the African diaspora into new expressions of blackness that respond to their localized experiences of racial exclusion. Participation in African diasporic space not only facilitates cultural exchange across different African diasporic sites, but it also exposes local communities in these sites to new understandings and expressions of blackness from other places. As one manifestation of these processes in Puerto Rico, reggaetón refutes the hegemonic construction of Puerto Rican national identity as a "racial democracy." Similar to countries such as Brazil and Cuba, the discourse of racial democracy in Puerto Rico posits that Puerto Ricans are descendents of European, African, and indigenous ancestors. Yet this conception simultaneously holds that racial divisions in Puerto Rico are obsolete, a notion at serious odds with the reality of persistent white privilege on the island.

I argue that discourses of racial democracy are spatially constituted in a "cultural topography." Different conceptions of blackness are "emplaced" within distinct locations throughout the island such that certain towns or neighborhoods are associated with particular ideas about blackness. These multiple ideas about blackness operate differently vis-à-vis racial democracy. On one hand, representations of a "folkloric" and "antiquated" blackness have been emplaced in the northeastern town of Loíza to symbolize the African component of racial democracy. At the same time, an understanding of blackness as "abject" is emplaced in urban housing projects, or caseríos, as the "primitive" counterpoint to the more "modern" whitened Puerto Rican nation sustained by racial democracy. The perceived connections between distinct conceptions of blackness and particular places throughout Puerto Rico often conflict and, in the process, expose some of the contradictions inherent to dominant discourses of racial democracy. Specifically, mapping out the various emplacements of blackness in Puerto Rico calls attention to racial democracy discourses' simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of blackness into elitist depictions of Puerto Rican identity. At the same time, possibilities exist within these contradictions to express other definitions of blackness that refute racial democracy discourses.

Reggaetón inserts one alternative understanding of blackness into Puerto Rican society. Multiple processes of migration and cultural exchange exposed Puerto Ricans in San Juan to musical practices from various sites in the African diaspora including hip hop, Jamaican dancehall, and Panamanian reggae en español. Puerto Rican youth combined these various musical influences in unique ways to produce reggaetón. At the same time, however, participation in diasporic space also introduced Puerto Rican youth to new ways of imagining blackness. Through their own experiences with migration to the United States, Puerto Rican youth encountered new forms of racialization that, in turn, led to the recognition of comparable experiences of racial exclusion with other African diasporic communities. Reggaetón developed in part through these various diasporic connections, expressing black identities that countered the local processes of racialization in Puerto Rican discourses of racial democracy.

My dissertation begins with the development of underground, the precursor to reggaetón, in the mid-1990s. I discuss the specific ways in which engagement with diasporic space created the conditions of possibility for reggaetón to develop in Puerto Rico. My chapters about the initial creation of underground and the success of artist Tego Calderón demonstrate that diasporic resources give new valence to understandings of blackness that transcend the boundaries of Puerto Rico's cultural topography. In addition, I show how these cultural expressions also transform the meanings of already widely recognized Afro-Puerto Rican signifiers.

History has shown us that radical cultural politics are often met with tremendous resistance, and the constitutive forms of this resistance can tell a story about national and racial imperatives. I analyze two government-sanctioned campaigns aimed at censoring reggaetón to consider the ways that diasporic spaces pose serious challenges to the authority of racial democracy. In the 1990s, the Puerto Rican government confiscated underground recordings as part of a larger anti-crime initiative. Several years later, in 2002, the Puerto Rican Senate launched an Anti-Pornography Campaign that targeted sexual imagery in reggaetón music videos. I consider these initiatives as evidence of the perceived "threat" that reggaetón posed to hegemonic constructions of racial democracy. An analysis of the multiple censorship campaigns against reggaetón reveals the pedagogical moves that the Puerto Rican government employed in an attempt to maintain the hegemony of elitist discourses of racial democracy.

Situated in the intersecting fields of race theory, diaspora theory, and cultural studies, my dissertation employs interdisciplinary methodologies and a multi-faceted theoretical approach to consider the work of diaspora in Puerto Rican reggaetón. My research illuminates the ways that reggaetón articulates understandings of blackness that challenge hegemonic constructions of race and national identity and, in the process, create possibilities for connecting blackness and Latinidad in new ways.

This dissertation seeks to comprehensively refocus the analytical frameworks dealing with black modern subjectivity through an in-depth examination of “Culturalism,” or the regime of meaning-making in which Blackness is culturally specified and abstracted from material, political economic, and structural conditions of dispossession through state technologies of antiradicalism. Cold War liberalism institutionalized the hegemony of cultural politics and Culturalism by foregrounding cultural analyses of African retention and syncretism, cultural continuity, and comparative diasporic cultures. As the Cold War instantiated the bifurcation of the world and influenced the direction of decolonization, the African diaspora as an analytical framework became reduced to its cultural aspects. It essentially framed connections among African descendants in terms of culture; asserted Black modernity and claims to equality on cultural grounds; and constructed culture as the domain of struggle. Culturalism divorced Blackness and the African diaspora from the material realties of governmentalized, transnational state projects that sustain racial and class hierarchies.

The hegemony of Culturalism in contemporary theories of the Black condition and the African diaspora diverge significantly from those of the Black radical structure of feeling that conceptualized Diaspora (thought not explicitly named at this time) through a nexus that included political economy, cultural formations, and nationalism. Conditions of Black abjection were seen to permeate both the base and the superstructure such that mobilization on both fronts was necessary to combat white supremacy. The result has been a turn away from the political economy/structural critique that, in the interwar period, provided a theoretical framework to challenge American antiblack statist discourse. The marginalization of Black radicalism and political economy produced the politicization of culture as the dominant mode of organizing for Black equality, and the primary intellectual focus in African diaspora studies.

Anticommunism entrenched this move away from structural critique by criminalizing and disciplining critiques that opposed the racialized social order, the spread of empire, and capitalist accumulation. Instead of challenging their exclusion from the state based on economic dispossession and maldistribution of resources, Black people in the United States began to mobilize around cultural specification, for inclusion based on liberal civil rights discourse, and/or to assert international linkages based on mutually recognized cultural enunciations of blackness. In other words, the Cold War curtailed the possibilities of challenging the state in terms of the political economy of exploitation, thus Blackness came to be understood in nationalist and cultural terms of exclusion. At the same time, decolonizing countries that sought equality in the world-system asserted their willingness and ability to adopt the culture of development, modernization, and anticommunism. This was notwithstanding the fact that their insertion into the global political economy as sovereign nations continued relations of unequal exchange, declining terms of trade, and neocolonialism.

Culturalism is thus a function of antiradical and antiblack statist pedagogy, and after World War II, it became entangled with anticommunism as an instrumentality of surveillance and violence. Culturalism institutionalized the erasure of radical political economic critique in the theorizing of the black global condition, the disciplining of Black radicalism, and the cultural specification of African diaspora studies examined in the dissertation. The cultural specification of blackness and the forms of Culturalism that it takes are integrally related to statist technologies that facilitate the accommodation of black intellectual and practical challenges to the capitalist state while, at the same time, ensuring their cooptation. These are the bases for the surveillance, disciplining, and punishment of black radical critique.