Urban football narratives and the colonial process in Lourenço Marques

Support for Portuguese football teams, in Mozambique as well as in other former Portuguese colonies, could be interpreted either as a sign of the importance of a cultural colonial heritage in Africa or as a symbol of a perverse and neo-colonial acculturation. This article, focused on Maputo, the capital of Mozambique – formerly called Lourenc¸o Marques – argues that in order to understand contemporary social bonds, it is crucial to research the connection between the colonial process of urbanisation and the rise of urban popular cultures. Despite the existence of social discrimination in colonial Lourenc¸o Marques, deeply present in the spatial organisation of a city divided between a ‘concrete’ centre and the immense periphery, the consumption of football, as part of an emergent popular culture, crossed segregation lines. I argue that football narratives, locally appropriated, became the basis of daily social rituals and encounters, an element of urban sociability and the content of increasingly larger social networks. Therefore, the fact that a Portuguese narrative emerged as the dominant form of popular culture is deeply connected to the growth of an urban community

How Societies Remember /

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 25 Nov 2014)

The feruloyl esterase system of Talaromyces stipitatus: production of three discrete feruloyl esterases, including a novel enzyme, TsFaeC, with a broad substrate specificity.

Several extracellular feruloyl esterases were produced by the mesophilic fungus Talaromyces stipitatus when grown on selective carbon sources in liquid media. Type-A and Type-B feruloyl esterases, as defined by their substrate specificity against methyl hydroxycinnamates, were produced during growth on wheat bran and sugar beet pulp, respectively. In addition, Tal. stipitatus produced a new type of esterase (TsFaeC) during growth on sugar beet pulp with a broader spectrum of activity (Type-C) against the (hydroxy)cinnamate esters than those previously described. All three enzymes were purified and N-terminal amino acid sequences and internal peptide sequences determined. The TsFaeC sequences were used to amplify a gene fragment from Tal. stipitatus genomic DNA. The flanking sequences were identified with the aid of RACE-RTPCR, and a full-length clone constructed. The faeC gene is present as a single copy and contains a single intron. The complete cDNA fragment contains an ORF of 1590bp, faeC, which is predicted to encode a 530 amino acid pre-protein, including a 25-residue signal peptide, and to produce a mature protein of M(R) 55 340Da. There was no evidence for a carbohydrate-binding domain in TsFaeC

Postmodern Antigones: Women in Black and the Performance of Involuntary Memory

The author analyzes how one non-governmental, anti-war organization in Serbia, Women in Black (Žene u crnom) -- a branch of an international feminist and anti-militarist organization -- remembers and commemorates every year the execution of 8,372 Muslim civilians, in a Bosnian town, Srebrenica that took place in July of 1995. The text is departing from an assumption that the act of remembering does not always depend on a stable system of place, but it can also depend on the bodies, and to concentrate on bodily (or incorporated) practices means to question a dominant idea that only written words, or tangible monuments, may be taken as a metaphor for remembering. Therefore, live performances of Women in Black, here and now, with their subversive aesthetics, are seen as a potential threat. Their performances are also turning them into a kind of contemporary Antigones, or anomalous female historians. To be a female historian is not merely to write about the past, it also means binding oneself to the dead, to tell the truth about the suffering of the Other, who is absent, or dead, and cannot speak for himself