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Background: Government-funded schemes introduced to encourage new afforestation (exotic and indigenous) include the establishment of low-density plantings (less than 1100 stems ha–1) of manuka (Leptospermum scoparium Forster et Forster f.) on steeplands with severe erosion susceptibility and considered marginal for pastoral production. There is, however, little quantitative data to establish when (i.e., how many years after planting) these plantings likely afford effective mitigation against the initiation of shallow landslides.Methods: Permanent sample plots [PSPs] were established within manuka plantings established in northern Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand, where above-ground growth metrics were recorded for plantings on three landform units including interfluve ridges, colluvial slopes, and slopes affected by landslides. The root systems of a small sub-set of manuka were hand-excavated and whole plants destructively sampled for analysis of differences in allometric relationships by year, between landforms, and for comparison of the above-ground components of trees within PSPs.Results: Six years after planting, interfluves and colluvial slopes were understocked by between 10 and 25%, and by up to 45% on sites previously affected by landslides. Root collar diameter (RCD) explained between 92 and 99% of the variation in manuka biomass. The overall above- and below-ground metrics for manuka excavated from interfluves were significantly greater (P<0.05) than those excavated from landslides. Irrespective of landform type, the greatest proportion of the mean total root length and biomass was found in the top 0–0.5 m of the soil profile, within a 0.5-m radius of the stump, and importantly, no roots were found below 1 m depth. The timing (years after planting) to attain canopy closure and root occupancy, if stands of m?nuka were to remain fully stocked, varies between landforms and would likely occur between 6.5 and 9 years after planting. However, variable rates in planting density, and of plant mortality, resulting in under-stocking would significantly delay this timing, particularly on landslide-affected slopes.Conclusions: Manuka planted at densities below 1100 stems ha–1 are unlikely to provide effective erosion mitigation on steep land until significant root mass develops below the depth of the shear plane at which most landslides occur. Increasing the planting density, reducing early seedling mortality by better management of weed competition, and/or their replacement (blanking) would probably improve the erosion mitigation effectiveness of future low-density manuka plantings.

[Alma Marie] (Forster) Paull, 85, of Bloomfield, died Thursday (June 8, 2006) at her home. Alma was born September 23, 1920, daughter of the late Carl F. Forster, Sr. and Marion (Nelson) Forster. She lived in Bloomfield all of her life and was employed by Society for Savings Bank.

Many Anglo-American novels set in Italy project stereotypical visions of Italian culture as an exotic foreign influence that changes the life of a repressed Anglo-American expatriate. In contrast, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and Bernard Malamud’s Pictures of Fidelman offer a more nuanced vision of Italian identity while exploring the linkages between diaspora and resistance to sexual heteronormativity. Both novels build on an Anglo-American literary tradition of linking Italianness to male homoeroticism, imagining Italian spaces as a liberating antidote to a heteronormative home culture. However, Baldwin and Malamud complicate the cultural encounters that invite social resistance: while Giovanni’s Room probes what occurs when the queer diasporic trajectories of a white American and an Italian intersect, Pictures of Fidelman imagines a Jewish American protagonist whose time in Italy functions as a form of double expatriation. In the process, a threedimensional vision of Italianness emerges, revising a problematic genre within Anglo-American literary history.

Intervening in modernist literary studies and critical whiteness studies, this dissertation argues that modernist novels featuring largely white casts of characters and few themes or plotlines of overtly racial content are key sites for understanding how white people manifest their racial identities in subtle, indirect, and often unwitting ways. While it is taken for granted that race is a key factor in texts by writers of color, critics still tend to consider the racial dynamics of texts by white writers only when they involve primitivism, Orientalism, or scenes of interracial violence. This narrow framework exempts large swathes of white literary production from racial analysis simply because they do not feature overt racism or overtly racist representational forms. Through readings of novels by Jean Rhys, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Willa Cather, “Scattered Supremacies” uncovers forms of white supremacy more subtle and oblique than either white people’s stigmatizations of people or color or overt proclamations of white racial superiority. I focus on novels that feature little to no interracial conflict between white and nonwhite people, novels where white characters are not consciously thinking about their own whiteness. Within these texts, I argue, whiteness emerges out of conflicts between different classes of white people trying to distinguish themselves from other whites. These intra-racial class conflicts involve moralistic identification with a range of economically coded and thus seemingly race-neutral virtues, such as hard work, independence, discipline, and the austere capacity to endure hardship. In clinging to a sense of themselves as embodying these virtues, white characters and their white authors are constantly managing the boundaries and connotations of whiteness, even if they are not consciously doing so and even if the people disparaged for lacking these virtues are other whites. The stakes of being able to recognize the kinds of economically coded racial discourse identified in these texts are especially high, for claims about the possession or lack of classically liberal, seemingly “race-neutral” virtues like industriousness, discipline, and self-reliance are an increasingly crucial part of how white supremacy is perpetuated under “colorblind” neoliberalism.

It is well known that the First World War had a profound effect on many writers. The tragedy of the war itself, and the fact that it ran so counter to the idea of the evolutionary progress that permeated Western civilization before its outbreak, brought about profound disillusionment. Conrad, however, appears to be among the few writers of the time whose work does not exhibit the same disillusionment as that of his fellow writers. This essay argues that Conrad, unlike his fellow writers, felt none of the optimistic spirit about the progress of Western civilization beforehand. Long before the war, Conrad felt the same skeptical disillusionment that began to appear in the works of Conrad's fellow writers after the war. The First World War merely reinforced Conrad's already profound skepticism regarding Western civilization.