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Black Panther is the first blockbuster science fiction film to be produced by Hollywood with a predominantly black cast, which places black people at the front and centre of futuristic worlds. The language used in Black Panther is the South African Nguni language, IsiXhosa. A survey of literature shows that there is scant research that has been done so far to explore the use of the African language and how the sci-fi movie preserves and promotes African languages, particularly isiXhosa. The aim of the study was to explore the use of the African language by young black South African viewers. This study also aimed to explore how the film preserves and promotes South African languages. The study employed a qualitative methodology to explore the promotion of the isiXhosa language in the film, specifically the audience reception method. The study used a cultural studies approach as its conceptual framework. The reception analysis consisted of focus group discussions as well as follow-up in-depth interviews. A purposive sampling method was employed to select its participants. The study found that cultures and languages have primarily been inferior to Western cultures and languages. The movie, however, challenges that notion by promoting and reflecting on African cultures, using a South African language. This study contributes towards critical studies in media and communication research that aims to understand audience consumption of media texts. This is achieved by providing insight into how and why audiences in specific social contexts make sense of media text and the use of African languages in media text.

A representatividade negra é fundamental para a igualdade racial, mas é evidente a ausência de negros na produção cultural popular. O cinema, considerada sétima arte, é um exemplo cultural de como os negros e os valores antirracistas são minoria na indústria do entretenimento. No esforço de romper com esta lógica, é importante a produção de obras e pedagogias contra-hegemônicas. Neste texto, de cunho bibliográfico, evidencia-se a luta de classes como ponto inicial na investigação de valores particulares, como o racismo, em obras da indústria cultural. Por meio da análise da obra Black Panther (2018), reconhecida por valorizar a cultura africana e se engajar no combate ao racismo, investiga-se os valores nela defendidos, o contexto social de sua produção e os interesses dos detentores dos meios de produção, que excluíram essa obra da produção de videogames. Essa trajetória tem por finalidade refletir sobre seu valor para a educação, questionando qual educação é necessária para superar valores racistas veiculados no cotidiano e refletidos na indústria cultural. O método utilizado procura se apropriar dos avanços da análise marxista sobre as relações sociais impostas pelo capitalismo, relações que selecionam o acesso a elementos culturais e formam consciências. Como resultado, foi possível confirmar que enquanto os meios de produção se encontrarem na mão de uma minoria que detém o poder econômico, seus interesses serão imperiosos na produção de cultura industrial, consumida de forma massificada, mas a educação pode se constituir como ferramenta política na superação da lógica discriminatória, especialmente aquela que alimenta o racismo estrutural.

Communication strategies in the modern period have become progressively multimodal with technological advancement. Multimodal communication involves forming a meaning through several modes than just language. This includes verbal and non-verbal communication, such as movie poster. Movie poster is one of the most effective promotional techniques to introduce the movie to potential audiences. Movie posters feature verbal and visual language as communication modes that can be interpreted to a certain meaning, including the movie’s theme, plot, and message. The visual grammar theory by Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) propose metafunctions to analyze image, including representational meaning. In representational meaning, communication modes must be able to represent elements and their relations in a world outside of their representational system as perceived by people. This paper demonstrates how various modes in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” movie poster are integrated to represent meaning and symbolism in the movie through representational meaning.

This article analyzes the cultural politics of the vacillating imagination of "us" represented in Black Panther, released in 2018. This popular cultural text centralizes Blackness in that it refers to instances of Black oppression in the early 1990s. Amid the contradiction between the film's Black-centered content and the form of the Hollywood superhero genre, the imagination of "us" in the film expands and shrinks. Drawing on concepts developed by Fredric Jameson and Étienne Balibar, including imaginary resolution, utopian potential, ideological containment, and equaliberty, this article critically examines the ideologies in the text. When it comes to the expansion of "us," the article explores the utopian potential in the representation of the radical villain. In terms of the shrinkage of "us," it investigates the function of ideological containment in the Hollywood superhero movie by focusing on the representation of the hero, and the portrait of South Korea as a spectacular background. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some have viewed the internationally acclaimed blockbuster hit, the Black Panther film, as feminist; meanwhile, others have highlighted its aspects of African culture focusing on its traditional elements and Afrofuturistic aspects. One of the main characters, Actress Lupita Nyong'o, who played Nakia said that Black Panther signifies a balanced representation of women and men, and she later alluded to feminism as she explained the balanced idyllic gender representation between the sexes. This study found that the roles of the leading women characters in this Afrofuturistic film—the top characters were derived from the IMDB's list—represented Africana womanism. The women at the heart of this study are warriors including Nakia, a War Dog of Wakanda; Okoye, the first lieutenant of the Dora Milaje and Ayo, a member; Princess Shuri, the head of Wakanda's technological division; the Queen Mother of Wakanda, Ramonda, who was King T'Challa and Princess Shuri's mother; and the Merchant Tribe Elder and the Mining Tribe Elder of the Wakandan Tribal Council. The egalitarian relationship between the women and the men in the film, and the representation of the women, showed a revisioning of African history in the recreation of an Afrofuturistic present. Thereby, the women's portrayal emerged from the wider egalitanian Wakandan society, which depicted a mythological African utopian nation, and yet, simultaneoulsy reignited an African historical reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Ryan Coogler's film Black Panther (2018) and its strategies of representation that challenge negative stereotypes of Africa. The author argues that Coogler's film presents a positive image of continental Africa by contrasting settings, challenging dominant power structures, and empowering African women. The article draws on postcolonial theory to analyze the film's contribution to the reconstruction of narratives about Africa. While the film faced racist criticism and controversy, it also achieved commercial success and sparked discussions about African cultural immersion. The text encourages a more accurate and multifaceted understanding of Africa's diverse realities. [Extracted from the article]

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Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther has grossed over a $1 billion globally, making it an exceptional record for Marvel Studios. This article explores Black Panther against the theoretical terrain of Afrofuturism, revealing hope for new imaginations of being and caution against the over-celebration of the binary switch in representation as forms of capital and patriarchy linger in the new fabric of Afrofuturistic imaginings (Davis 2017, Bennet 2016, Callier 2018, Dery 1994, English & Kim 2013, Womack 2013). The article takes a scoping approach attempting to map the terrain of literature around Coogler’s Black Panther. It also attempts to put in dialogue political economy and the text as a precursor to audience reception. The article takes up the problematics of Afrofuturism through literature around Black Panther and the political economy around production. A brief history of the conception and making of the film is pursued to suggest its coming of age as a result of the rise of Black Twitter and the global #BlackLivesMatter movement, while exploring the murkier aspects of bots influencing debate on these forums and the backlash on twitter itself. The article concludes reiterating the complexity of Afrofuturism as it looks to a utopian future. This scoping approach attempts to reveal the lacuna with regard to reception analyses of Black Panther. It is envisaged that a reception analysis performed against the backdrop of production and text could contribute to advancing current Afrofuturistic imaginings even as they are bound up in the problematic political economy of the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Maracanan is the property of Revista Maracanan and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The black superhero film is an important research object for anti-racism development. Under the White supremacy framework, Black people and culture have been devalued and neglected for a long time. The all-Black lead Marvel film Black Panther, directed by Ryan Coogler in 2018, employs a well-defined system to present the appeals on anti-racist and reconstruct the filmic Black identity. This study explicitly analyses the approach through which the images of Black people and Black culture are represented, and it attempts to understand how this film reconstructs Black people's sense of self-identity. This study focuses on the physical appearance of Black superheroes and material culture, the spatial narrative of Black Panther 's fictional spatial world Wakanda, and the Black spirit depicted in the film. Cultural identity, cinematic representation theory, and social identity theory are used to interpret how Black Panther reconstructs Black identity and represents Black culture. This study discovers that Black superheroes are portrayed as powerful, justice, and wise as White people, and Wakanda provides a utopia for a non-racist world. Meanwhile, Black culture is depicted elegantly and proudly to reconstruct Black people's recognition of cultural and social identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the box office success of the recent Black Panther films it may seem that Hollywood's approach to such films is slowly accommodating a domestic audience's demand for diversity. Yet, there is a danger in assuming that these films are still largely made for white audiences, since these audiences and their representatives in Hollywood boardrooms may become convinced that films like this are proof of Hollywood having engaged with Africa and done enough about diversity. This paper argues that to ensure the continued success of diverse artists in Hollywood and elsewhere the focus should extend beyond a study of the domestic market and look toward the formal 'alien esthetic' engagements and structure of the colonial gazing at spectacle that Hollywood demands all its audiences invest in. This paper presents Africa's established experience of super diversity and its recognized authority in the arts – particularly the way its formal esthetics of spectacle and fantasy exceed the visual and are entwined with the lived-conditions of its audiences – as central to approaching a deeper understanding of diversity in cinema. Drawing upon this "progressive African aesthetic" to expand Hollywood's formal engagement with fantasy and visual spectacle, opens an opportunity to decolonize Hollywood's gaze and understand diversity in cinema more deeply. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of sacrificing queerness when adapting comics into films, which cater to wider audiences – specifically, queer elision in Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018) and illusions of queerness in Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman (2017). The difference between elision and illusion is crucial, and so approached using different analytical modes. Black Panther’s analysis is rooted in the production process, exploring how/why queerness is erased by drawing comparisons to the explicit queerness of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxanne Gay’s comics. The analysis of Wonder Woman focuses on in-depth textual analysis of both Greg Rucka’s comics and Jenkins’s film to illustrate how queer illusions functions across media. Despite these films being hailed as progressive, this paper illuminates how motivations to hide queerness when moving to wider audiences are rooted in homophobia and protecting profit margins.

This paper offers South geographies as real-world activations of "Wakanda" zones, zones at the edges of Empire. It offers Southern black expressive cultures (specifically, the Global South nation of Trinidad) as Afrofurtural in their capacities for articulating new calibrations of black freedom (in relation to real-world enduring structures of black capture). This paper focuses specifically on the invention of the steelpan in the Afro-Trinidadian village of Laventille, showing that the geography conditioning the instrument's production is Wakanda-like. As such, it reads, in the technological invention of the steelpan, an Afrofutural articulation of a black freedom. Unlike the black freedom central to the cinematic rendition of Wakanda, the black freedom of Laventille's steelpan world is not completely disentangled from global systems of anti-black violence. However, steelpan's expressive culture does establish, in the present, a futural gesture of what it means for black living to overflow such global systems of black death-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many people argued that Black Panther was a revolutionary film, a claim that somewhat obscures that it was success under capitalism that made Black Panther seem more radical in content than it actually was. Placing director Ryan Coogler within the ranks of radical filmmaking ironically undercuts the challenge of sustaining a successful Black commercial vision that can still contain interesting ideas about Black life. This essay explores the differences between framing Black Panther as an example of independent Third Cinema vs. commercial Hollywood cinema and argues that the conditions of production make radicalism unlikely, but that does not mean that the loved media object is not politically interesting, or that the tension between adhering to ideology and resisting means it is less important than a radical and disruptive cultural production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Black Panther phenomenon emerged at the nexus of Black speculative culture, Afrofuturism studies, Africana Esoteric Studies, and the Black spatial imagination. This phenomenon is emerging at a unique moment in world history when the world order has been slowly shifting from a unipolar to multipolar framework since the late twentieth century but accelerated since the 2008 economic collapse and accelerated since the beginning of the Eurasian land war between Russia and Ukraine. The accelerating pace of change and the accompanying existential impact of the social change is interacting with the changing geopolitical landscape to produce an ever-growing array of art and aesthetics reflecting the emerging world order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This symposium is an active engagement with the edited volume, Afrofuturism in Black Panther: Gender, Identity, and the Remaking of Blackness, a text that provides an interdisciplinary examination of the 2018 film Black Panther. The symposium introduction provides an overview of the history and widespread impact of Afrofuturism as theory and practice and offers a summary of the contributors' essays. Each of the four contributors, Reynaldo Anderson, Rebecca Wanzo, Kris F. Sealey and Jane Anna Gordon use Afrofuturism in Black Panther as a point of departure for their examinations of the continued impact of Afrofuturism, politics and identity, and cultural practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internationally renowned Nigerian-American sci-fi writer Nnedi Okorafor recently wrote that she no longer wants her work to be considered Afrofuturism, preferring her own term Africanfuturism. Okorafor argues that despite the potential for Afrofuturism to underscore global Blackness, in practice it has privileged African American concerns while marginalising those of Africa. Okorafor, whose work includes several comics including Black Panther, Shuri, and LaGuardia, argues that her work should be understood as explicitly African rather than part of the Black diaspora. She puts this notion into practice by writing novels and comics set in Africa with African characters 'sometimes with aliens, sometimes with witches, often set in a recognizable, future Africa, with African lineages – that are not cultural hybrids but rooted in the history and traditions of the continent, without a desire to look toward Western culture.' Okorafor's need to assert the notion of Africa as an important site of Blackness in comics highlights the marginal standing of representations of Africa in discourses of global Blackness in comics, even in the contemporary era of diversity, inclusion, and equity. This article examines Okorafor's Marvel comic Shuri to further elucidate Africanfuturism and consider the concept as a paradigm for approaching African comic content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often a challenge for an instructor to get the students' attention for interactive class learning. This paper focuses on the use of Black Panther movie characters to stimulate power bases discussion in class to encourage reflective observation and abstract conceptualization. Power bases are important because they are interlinked with other management concepts such as leadership, negotiation and organizational change. This exercise helped students identify the correct dominating power base of the main characters and cascaded into understanding of the complex interplays among them. The paper discusses the improved engagement and understanding of the 'power' concept overall and its applications through the use of this movie-based activity. It further enhanced their creative thinking and encouraged them to find appreciation for 'power' concept in routine business life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The stereotypical representation of the Black world in Western cultural repositories has often been of great concern to scholars in African studies. This prejudicial delineation fosters dystopian sensibility on the unconscious mind of the Blackman who involuntarily internalises the myths of his sub-humanity. Stephen Hopkins’ 'The Ghost and the Darkness' (1996), Antoine Fuqua’s 'Tears of the Sun' (2003), Terry George’s 'Hotel Rwanda' (2004), Fernando Meirelles’ 'The Constant Gardener' (2005), Kevin Macdonald’s 'The Last King of Scotland' (2006), Cary Fukunaga’s 'Beasts of No Nation' (2015), and Mira Nair’s 'Queen of Katwe' (2016), for instance, project the Black world as a locus horridus. Though this stereotype has been invalidated in many scholarly writings, the Hollywood superhero movie, 'Black Panther' (2018), further intensifies the repudiation, affirming the Blackman’s contributions to humanity, albeit with a touch of narcissism. Using sci-fi genre, the movie provides a fictional truth, abstracted reality averring the cargo cult thinking of the Blackman. This is because the movie envisions Black hegemony and a world that pays homage to the wealth and imagined techno-scientific prowess of the Blackman. In this article, I examine the underlying subtexts in the movie, interrogating its Afrofuturist or Africanfuturist agenda. I argue that the agenda is steeped in illusionism, fringe science, esoteric spirituality, and cargo cult mentation. I contend that the failure of the Black world to catch up with the rest of the world may have necessitated its love for esoteric and infantile desires, rather than exploring the material, empirical realities around it to effectuate tangible development.

This study aims at reflecting on the Projeto Pantera Negra: Representatividade Negra e Práticas Educacionais, implemented in public schools by the Belo Horizonte's municipal government in 2018. The project aims at promoting the insertion of the Law 10.639/2003 as well as the debate on the black representation, especially black female representation. The Black Panther film, a North American production, released in 2018 in Brazil, draws attention for having a mostly black cast and being set largely on the African continent, in the fictitious country of Wakanda. In our analysis, in addition to bringing reflections on the film, we discuss the answers of the questionnaire applied to the public-school teachers who actively participated in the action. Our findings show that the project Pantera Negra is a large-scale project for the implementation of ethnic-racial relations education, even in the face of other equally relevant issues, since the film presents scenes that still contribute to a binary imaginary, i.e., East vs. West, allowing other questions to be woven and spun in the search for the emancipation of the black population and the decolonization of curricula. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transhumanism, race, gender, and cultural identity in early 21st century popular culture movies: Black Panther; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; and Wonder Woman is the focus of this essay. Transhumanism refers to a super-powered human, able to transcend conventional human capabilities and accomplish physical, psychic, intellectual, and emotional feats of strength and perseverance such as extra sensory perception and the ability to fly. Three authors examine how their positionality impacted their experiences of the movies' narratives, characterizations, and significance. Each author considers their own enculturated, racialized, and gendered backgrounds to contemplate the personal impact of the films as empowering and inspirational. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anticipated by many, and equally a site of contention or reverence, Black Panther and its accompanying original musical score as composed by Ludwig Görranson is rife for analysis and brings to fore the question: in what ways is a Hollywood practice used in a film with seemingly other aesthetic aims? A score which features few disparate and disconnected vague references to an “African sound” for the imagined country of Wakanda is undercut even more so by the insistent use of an otherwise purely western orchestral score. Firstly, through a brief overview of Göransson’s production approaches to the score for Black Panther, and his collaboration with local experts, this article argues for a more nuanced understanding of authorship arising from such collaborations between these expert improvising music and film composers who tend to be the sole credited composers. Furthermore, musical representations are complicated by the recurring theme of the “other” according to Classical Hollywood tropes through the integration of occasional African instruments. In section two, brief transcriptions of the music composed for the character Killmonger are provided, in the search for representation devices – how the music works to or fails to establish the character. Also provided are the authors’ personal insights as to whether or not Göransson’s intentions with the music are in fact evident in the film. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In February 2018, South Africa was hit by the Black Panther (Coogler 2018) fever. Multitudes of people thronged movie houses in their cultural regalia. The movie’s release seemed to have signalled a “cultural moment”. Several scholars have engaged with Black Panther’s cultural significance and thematic engagement. However, extant literature has not fully explored and accounted for the movie’s popularity in audiences’ specific socio-historical contexts of consumption. More so, current studies on Black Panther have mostly relied on text-based approaches and paid scant attention to audiences’ contexts and lived experiences. Premised on a cultural studies approach, this reception analysis sought to explore and account for the popularity of Black Panther among Black South African women in Soweto township. The study’s findings show that the popularity of Black Panther among Black South African women in Soweto is attributable to the meanings associated with resistance and pleasure that subaltern audiences negotiate from the movie. Audiences’ situated discourses and the film’s Afrofuturist orientation combine to unravel a “cultural moment” for Black women in Soweto where they can challenge and subvert localised and global forms of oppression that afflict them. The film opens up symbolic space for subaltern Black South African women to recuperate voice and their agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the commercial success of Black Panther (Coogler 2018) and its ostensible achievement of making Hollywood more representative of black people and “their” narratives, the film is limited in terms of the progress on inclusion it can achieve. This is because, as a Hollywood superhero film, its success is predicated upon perpetuating the colonisation of the imagination of its (still largely white) spectators and it does not represent black people on their own terms. A close focus on form exposes the film as retaining the spectacular and action-orientated visual language of Hollywood that engenders cinema as fundamentally voyeuristic and imperial. In this way, a close examination of Black Panther supports the examination of limits of what the commercial structure of an industry established upon the colonial gaze of spectacle is currently able to produce. This paper goes further and also argues that decolonisation in cinema should involve a more radical confrontation of Hollywood aesthetics and the formal language of Hollywood’s gaze itself, so that the embodied visual languages of global cinema and New Black cinema may be more widely employed to reveal the world of those colonised by Hollywood as materially different, on their own terms. It is only by going beyond the success of films like Black Panther in the box office and through a radical investigation of form and haptic visuality that the considerably unequal structure of the Hollywood boardroom − which produces such films in the first place − may be transformed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecofeminism is an interdisciplinary movement which dissects unhealthy power relations. Assessing the science fiction film Black Panther (Coogler 2018) through an ecofeminist lens offers up fruitful and complicated explorations. Ecofeminism focusses on the impacts of toxic hegemonies, and the paper evaluates representations of power in Black Panther. As the vibranium meteor gives Wakanda an advantage, vibranium functions as a speculative symbol for privilege, and the responsibilities that come with the power of privileged positioning are interrogated. An analysis of the representations of culture and nature in Black Panther potentially indicates that Wakanda is not as severed from nature as our contemporary global neoliberal culture – although, arguably, much of the imagery is idealised, and what is excluded from our view is as important as what is included. An uninvited ecofeminist observation suggests that Wakanda’s isolation goes against the grain of contemporary globalised neoliberalism and posits that self-reliance and self-subsistence can be a powerful alternative force. In our neoliberal system, where deregulated global trade is driving the Anthropocene, there is potentially a lesson in Wakanda’s selfsufficiency. Finally, a discussion of the heart-shaped herb reveals it to be a speculative symbol of ecofeminist connectivity through uniting humanity, nature, technology, and consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the reception of the figure of O. Wilde, the 19th-century English writer, and his works in the prose and criticism of Alexandra Mikhailovna Moiseeva (1874-1913), who entered the history of Russian literature of the Silver Age by the name of “Mire”. The study focuses mainly on her story Black Panther (1909), in which the author provides an original perspective on the tragic love episode in Wilde’s life. Attention is also paid to the thematic similarities between the works of Wilde and Mire in terms of genre, plot and literary image, as well as Mire’s interpretation of Wilde’s works in her critical reviews.

This article argues that Rider Haggard's 1885 novel King Solomon's Mines and filmed versions of it were a major influence on Ryan Coogler's 2018 hit film Black Panther. It examines ways in which the modern film in reversing some of the plot and colonial tropes of the original nonetheless remains indebted to it and that this source helps explain some of the weaknesses and inconsistencies of the plot of Black Panther. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If stars appear to change position, to be displaced when viewed from different point in the earth's orbit, then by analogy we might say that Afrofuturism and Afropessimism are parallax angles on the afterlife of slavery. Afrofuturism and Afropessimism inhabit forms of imaginative spacetime that are both congruent and incongruent. I will call the triangular relations among the afterlife of slavery, Afrofuturism, and Afropessimism, a "black mood." While this mood certainly has psychological meaning for individuals, I primarily point toward a sociological phenomenon that shapes the collective mood long term. This black mood is an intellectual disposition with emotional resonance. It produces both empowering joyful affects and disempowering sad affects. Though it is hardly the only black mood, this one is influential in sectors of the Blackamerican intelligentsia both within and beyond the academy. In this article, I explore a few points of contact among Afrofuturism, Afropessimism, and black religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article considers the representation of disability as a criminalised un- African identity in the film Black Panther (directed by Ryan Coogler, 2018). Relying heavily on centuries of differentiation and the hierarchical ordering of bodies "that matter", the film represents bodies as sites of writing and reading the politics of being and belonging in a future African society. Mass media representations of morality and criminality rely on this principle too. To construct the Wakandan moral identity, the film creates a criminalised non- Wakandan narrative that primarily relies on (dis)ability and futuristic prosthetic devices. A comparison between the characterisation of two white male characters, Ulysses Klaue and Everett Kenneth Ross, is presented in order to highlight their relationship to disability and its representation as a criminalised non-Wakandan concept. Klaue's prosthetic arm is framed to represent greed, theft, punishment, and death. The article further considers how the film explores the intersection between disability, gender, and class. Nakia's and Shuri's relationships to Ross is juxtaposed with Linda's relationship to Klaue in order to illustrate how the film constructs disability as a question of class and nationality. The article concludes by drawing lessons from Black Panther that can be used by film makers and media content producers alike. It highlights that in trying to imagine a desired African future, there is a need to embrace the complexities and multilayered nature of African bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]