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Dans cet article l'A etudie le role des officiers mongols servant dans l'armee chinoise et leur decision de rejoindre le coup manque de 1461 mene par le General Cao Qin contre les forces imperiales sous la dynastie Ming.

The association represents a host of different disciplines and interests. Its focus is on Africa, but not the events so much as the study of patterns and meaning of events. Its setting is in North America, but its constituency is tremendously diverse: native-born and naturalized, people of North American, African and European origin, institutional members as well as individual ones. Its officers, like myself, make campaign statements when we know the realities of the association only dimly; with time we realize how much of the continuity and wisdom of the organization come from the staff. I did not feel comfortable with a statement about the current situation in Africa, about which we all know something, nor with a statement about Africanist scholarship, the reason for which we come to the panels and keynotes of a meeting such as this. What I do feel a call to express is a reflection on the association in relation to its history and the changing situations in Africa and North America and in relation to African studies. And so finally I would like to talk about "The African Studies Association at age 35." The association was founded 35 years ago by 35 charter members, mostly white and mostly male. They organized along fairly traditional lines of a scholarly and largely university-based organization. Many came from the Title VI and other centers. They represented a variety of disciplines and formed committees for each of those disciplines. They convened an annual meeting built around panels and other events related to Africanist scholarship. The annual meeting provided the main revenue whereby a secretariat and elected board would function during the rest of the year.

East German playwright and novelist Christoph Hein rose to sudden prominence in the early 1980s with the publication of his somber novella, The Distant Lover (Derfremde Freund, 1982; published in the West as Drachenblut). Although the book's rather bleak depiction of life in the GDR was predictably attacked or praised by politically minded critics in the GDR and the FRG, its great popularity among readers in both Germanies attested to a shock of recognition that transcended political boundaries. The book is narrated by Claudia, a successful, intelligent, divorced, and childless East Berlin doctor who relates the events of her life during the preceding year. Near the middle of the book, she provides a detailed account of two abortions she had undergone while still married, characterizing them as acts of radical self-assertion. Yet Claudia always feels most free when she is most violated. The Distant Lover portrays an individual totally and fatally adapted to an inhuman society; the novella's fascination derives from Claudia's compelling, highly intelligent, but nonetheless specious rationalizations for the emotional deprivation she endures. Her feminist rhetoric of personal choice actually cloaks her own abjectness, and, indeed, her complicity in an oppressive society; and her abortions can reasonably be viewed as compelled and compulsive acts of proxy suicide. Thus the significance of abortion for the novella depends less on the social history of the abortion debate than on a grasp of Hein's critique of the autonomous individual's relation to society. If abortion is regarded as an extension of a basic right to privacy and self-determination, so be it; the novella scrutinizes the

Critical debate concerning William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses has been absorbed with the problem of whether the text coheres as a novel. Responding to charges that it was merely a repackaging of stories already published, studies in the 1970s argued for the book's unity by documenting Faulkner's revisions to the published stories and by elucidating their shared themes (Early, Creighton). More recently, this thematic unity has been seen as a mask for a deeper narrative disunity, in turn a reflection of unresolved social antagonism between blacks and whites (Limon). Yet narrative coherence, like race relations, evades all-or-nothing formulations; Go Down, Moses, like the society it depicts, is neither a seamless garment nor a cacophony of unrelated voices. Nor is race the only or ultimate determinant of the book's meaning. Faulkner offers instead a struggle between two unequally matched narratives, or rather two ways of telling and understanding the same events. As has become customary in criticism of James Joyce, "narration" is understood here to denote not just verbal articulation, but also nonverbal, nonmimetic shaping of the text; the narrator who actually speaks the words is to be viewed as one possible trope among many, not as a self-possessed subject freely deciding what to say. Faulkner's excluded narrators may not always come to voice, but they nonetheless influence or even control what gets said. The primary narrative treats perpetuation of the McCaslin family

ID Y the end of the eighteenth century, Leo Marx tells us, the U idea that "the American continent may be the site of a new golden age could be taken seriously in politics."' Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer is perhaps the best articulation of this utopian impulse, embodying in its third letter an agrarian version of the American dream. There he presents a vision of a society of social and economic equals, made independent through their economic dependence on the land alone yet bound together in a supportive and compassionate community. The agrarian values that James embodies in the book's opening -familial rootedness, reverence for nature, diligent work, economic egalitarianism, and an openness to those in need-are utopian in essence. They project an ideal society, the image of which becomes a stance for social criticism.2 Although Crevecoeur's presentation of the dream has only a peripheral relation to historical truth, something of the utopian impulse of the work has survived history, continuing to present a powerful image of what America might have become before it veered into the Industrial Age. The power of Crevecoeur's book is its utopian thrust, and as historical developments have rendered it more assuredly utopian, they have augmented the very source of its power. But what call can Crevecoeur's agrarian utopia legitimately have upon us? This essentially political question has been the unacknowledged subtext of much conflicting literary interpreta

drop in the stock markets around the world, after a period of enormous real growth in value, focusses attention on the role of equities in retirement plans. Faculty members whose current or future pensions are heavily dependent on ownership of CREF shares were affected directly by the market collapse. The value of CREF shares dropped 21 percent in October, after rising 34.5 percent the first nine months of 1987, and 22 percent in 1986. How should faculty respond to the truth of Bernard Baruch' s response, "The market will fluctuate"? The answer is, in the manner of amorous porcupines, carefully. Changes underway in TIAA and CREF, the major defined contribution plans available to faculty, will not only reward but require such care. I have been asked to give some advice for coping with this situation. For alliteration, I call this advice, "Robinson's Rules for Retirement."

Norman Robert Bennett. Arab versus European: Diplomacy and War in NineteenthCentury East Central Africa. New York and London: Africana Publishing Company, 1986. 325 pp. Index. Glenn S. Burne. Richard F. Burton. Twayne's English Authors Series. Boston: Twayne, 1985. 168 pp. Index, selected biblio. Dennis D. Cordell. Dar al-Kuti and the Last Years of the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. 283 pp. Appendices, biblio., figures, index, maps. David Robinson. The Holy War of Umar Tal: The Western Sudan in the midNineteenth Century. Oxford Studies in African Affairs. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985. 434 pp. Biblio., index, maps, tables.

THE IMPACT of the Transcendental writers upon Charles Ives has long been acknowledged in passing but seldom recognized as a pervasive element in his compositions or, indeed, as the ground of his whole view of musical expression. Ives himself is not responsible for this oversight, for in conversation, interviews, and published writings he repeatedly identified Emerson and Thoreau as his intellectual forebears; many writers, however, have regarded the Concord tradition as simply one among the innumerable components of his highly idiosyncratic music.1 The list of titles which refer explicitly to this tradition is imposing: one song based upon an Emersonian text ("Duty") and another entitled "Thoreau"; an Emerson piano concerto (unfinished); the Second Pianoforte Sonata, subtitled "Concord, Mass., i840-i860," with four movements called, respectively, "Emerson," "Hawthorne," "The Alcotts," and "Thoreau"; and the book-length Essays Before a Sonata, designed to accompany the previous work. The prose Essays, Ives's most extensive statement of his musical principles and, consequently, the starting-point for this article, is in effect a defense of the Transcendental attitude toward art as Ives interpreted it and applied it to his music. Not only does it reveal the extent of Ives's indebtedness to his fellow New Englanders, but it suggests that Ivesian musical techniques often suspected of being mere jokes or aberrations are actually carefully calculated pro

It is generally agreed that railways were a prerequisite to the Canadian 'wheat boom.' In this paper we analyse the timing of railway construction in south-eastern Saskatchewan during the wheat boom period. A monopoly model is derived in which a railway makes its construction and pricing decisions on the basis of a rational settler's response function. Between 1898 and 1906, when the CPR had a monopoly, the model closely predicts freight rates and the timing of branch line completions. The increase in branch line construction after 1898 is explained partly by the decline in the railway's operating cost and partly by the Crow's Nest Pass Agreement. This agreement raised the value of CPR land by setting long-term ceilings on freight rates. Le moment approprie pour la construction du chemin defer dans les prairies canadiennes. On est generalement d'accord pour dire que les chemins de fer ont ete une condition necessaire pour le boom du ble. Dans ce memoire, les auteurs analysent les decisions quant au moment de la construction des chemins de fer dans le sud-est de la Saskatchewan au cours de la periode du boom du ble. Ils derivent un modele de monopole dans lequel la compagnie de chemin de fer prend ses decisions quant a la construction et quant 'a la tarification sur la base d'une fonction de reaction des colons rationnels. Entre 1898 et 1906, la periode de monopole du CPR, le modele permet de predire 'a quel moment on devrait completer la construction de certaines lignes secondaires et quelle devrait etre la tarification. L'acceleration de la construction des lignes secondaires apres 1898 est attribuable en partie a la chute dans les couits d'operation du CPR et en partie a I'Accord des tarifs du Nid de Corbeau. Cet accord elevait la valeur des terres du CPR en imposant un plafond 'a long terme sur les tarifs.