The first-person plural in Hanif Kureishi's essays

In this discussion I examine the significance of the first-person plural in selections from Hanif Kureishi’s Collected Essays (2011). I identify two distinct ways in which it is employed, during two distinct periods of his writing. In his essays of the late 1980s Kureishi uses ‘we’ only rarely, and with notable care, always signalling for whom else he might be attempting to speak. In his essays about ‘fundamentalism’, however, especially those written after the London bombings of July 2005, his use of the first-person plural functions to interpellate the reader in a way not seen in the earlier writing. I argue that the rhetoric of defending liberalism which dominates this later writing can therefore be read as sacrificing a liberal aesthetic which enacts, rather than insists upon, openness and tolerance. The potential of the meditative literary essay as a form which might embody such a liberal aesthetic especially effectively may thereby be lost. </jats:p

SCOPE New Photographic Practices

The photographic practices brought together for this exhibition and publication provide a broad scope of how photographic and lens based media may be used in order to have a visceral and conceptual impact. The methods on show demonstrate the way that artists might pick and choose from the approaches, processes and debates that have arisen through the medium’s history. This collection of work features film, video and photography that demand a renegotiation of the relationship between camera, subject and viewer. Visual Art Centre Gallery, Tsinghua University, Beijing, Chin

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Caryl Phillips’ Cambridge and the (Re)construction of racial identity

In his study of the revisiting of the form of the slave narrative by African- American authors in the 1970s and 1980s, Ashraf Rushdy argues that the primary motives for this literary disinterment were political. In the aftermath of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s, these writers ‘wished to return to the literary form in which African American subjects had first expressed their political subjectivity in order to mark the moment of a newly emergent black political subject’ (7). A parallel movement can be seen at work in the black British writer Caryl Phillips’s fourth novel, Cambridge (1991)