Catarina Martins

Gold nanoparticles functionalised with stable, fast water exchanging Gd3+ chelates as high relaxivity contrast agents for MRI

Gold nanoparticles functionalized with Gd(3+) chelates displaying fast water exchange, superb pH stability and inertness towards transmetalation with Zn(2+) have been prepared and characterized as a new high relaxivity (29 mM(-1) s(-1), 30 MHz, 25 °C) contrast agent potentially safe for in vivo MRI applications. The Lipari-Szabo treatment for internal rotation was used to evaluate the effect of linker flexibility on the relaxivity of the gold nanoparticles. The effect of fast water exchange on the relaxivity of gold nanoparticles functionalized with Gd(3+) chelates is also addressed in this communication.

The dangers of the single story: Child-soldiers in literary fiction and film

Focusing on the paradox between innocence and responsibility generated by the term child-soldiers, which is treated differently in literary and cinematographic works from the North and the South, this article uses postcolonial theory in order to deconstruct ‘the single story’ that may be erasing these children’s many stories. Accordingly, the analysis brings to the fore both the supposed universality of a hegemonic notion of childhood, revealing it as a regulatory discourse which produces diverse subalternities, and the articulation of this notion within an Africanist discourse that legitimizes neocolonial practices in varied domains.

Polyphonic Disconcert around Polygyny. Riwan ou Le Chemin de Sable by Ken Bugul (Senegal) and Niketche. A Story of Polygamy by Paulina Chiziane (Mozambique)

This article intends to offer a feminist reading of two novels written by African women on the subject of polygyny.  Other novels will be drawn into the discussion, in order to demonstrate how polyphony as an aesthetical strategy corresponds to a political intention of making as many voices of women as possible heard on the subject.  A simplistic reading of polygyny as always merely oppressive to women, as opposed to monogamy as a desirable norm, is contradicted by an accent on complex power constellations, not to be defined through the parameter of gender alone, and by intersectional regards that discover invisible forms of agency and semantics of freedom and empowerment that feminist conceptual frameworks cannot account for so far.  The enlargement of perspectives leads to an epistemological questioning of the possible Eurocentrism and colonial semantics of some central concepts of feminist theory, such as power and emancipation.

“How Many People Have You Killed?”. Child-Soldiers in Literature and Film

This article will comparatively examine representations of child-soldiers in literary and cinematographic works from the North and the South, using post-colonial theory in an attempt to ascertain which power politics might be at play in the dominant northern discoursive construction of the issue, and which the focuses of resistance within a counter-discourse coming from the South are. I will also consider the way in which the southern counter-discourse and its strategies are being incorporated into the hegemonic main narrative.