Concrete stories, decomposing fictions: Body parts and body politics in Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad

This essay reads the English translation of Ahmed Saadawi’s novel Frankenstein in Baghdad (2018) to explore the “concrete stories” and “infrastructural narratives” devised by the US military in support of its occupation of Baghdad. By stitching together a city and society littered with composing and decomposing fictions, Saadawi’s novel reveals how biopolitical governance produces, contra the hegemonic US war story of security consolidation and societal stabilization, pervasive insecurity instead. Saadawi’s “decomposing fictions”, as I call them, operate on three homologous terrains: the (de)composition of the city; the (de)composition of the body; and the (de)composition of the narrative itself. Through this three-tired conflation, Saadawi shows how body parts are biopolitical, and how narratives actively and materially reshape human bodies and urban infrastructures. The essay therefore argues that the novel aligns with a critical posthumanist perspective, one that allows for a more rigorous consideration of narrative systems (including fictions) as constitutive of and impactful upon human and non-human bodies and urban infrastructures than other concepts, such as “planned violence”, have so far allowed. By theorizing a more complex relationship between narrative form and the built environment in the contexts of militarized colonial and biopolitical urban governance, the essay shows how Saadawi’s novel not only challenges the “imaginative geographies” of the colonial present, but its material infrastructures as well

Additional file 1: of A novel protection scheme for synchronous generator stator windings based on SVM

Verification of Synchronous Generator Model. (PDF 3520 kb

Effect of row spacing and speeding rate on Alfalfa (Hassawi) seed yield and two related traits

A field experiment was conducted at King Faisal University Research and Experimental Station, Al-Hassa during 1984 to 1987 to study the effect of row spacing and seeding rate on the seed yield of Hassawi alfalfa. The experiment included six row spacings: 15,30,45,60,75 and 90 cm and four seeding rates: 5, 10,20 and 40 kg/ha. An early seed crop was taken in the summer of the first year (1985) and two seed crops (early and late) were obtained in the summer of each of the second and third years (1986 and 1987). In the early seed crop of 1985, the 60 and 75 cm row spcaings gave the highest seed yeilds, producing 426 and 436 kg/ha, respectively. For the overall means of early and late seed crops of 1986 and 1987, the 30 and 75 cm row spacings produced the highest seed yields, giving 364.5 and 372.5 kg/ha, respectively. Lowest seed yields were obtained from either 15 or 45 cm row spacings, being 295.5 and 318.5 kg/ha, respectively. With respect to seeding rate, the seed yields obtained in 1985,1986 and 1987 were not significantly affected by the seeding rate treatments, although the 20 kg/ha seding rate gave the highest seed yield. In the late seed crop of 1986, the 75 row spacing gave significantly the highest 1O00-seed weight. In the early seed crop of 1985, the 90 cm spacing produced a significantly higher number of seeds per pod than the 15 cm spacing and in the late seed crop, the 90 cm gave a significantly higher number of seeds per pod than the 30 cm spacing. In the late seed crop of 1987, the seeding rate of 40 kg/ha gave significantly higher 1000-seed weight than the other seeding rate treatments. The seeding rate of 5 kg/ha produced a significantly higher number of seeds per pod than 40 kg/ha seeding rate

High-resolution repertoire analysis reveals a major bystander activation of Tfh and Tfr cells

International audienceT follicular helper (Tfh) and regulatory (Tfr) cells are terminally differentiated cells found in germinal centers (GCs), specialized secondary lymphoid organ structures dedicated to antibody production. As such, follicular T (Tfol) cells are supposed to be specific for immunizing antigens, which has been reported for Tfh cells but is debated for Tfr cells. Here, we used high-throughput T cell receptor (TCR) sequencing to analyze the repertoires of Tfh and Tfr cells, at homeostasis and after immunization with self- or foreign antigens. We observed that, whatever the conditions, Tfh and Tfr cell repertoires are less diverse than those of effector T cells and Treg cells of the same tissues; surprisingly, these repertoires still represent thousands of different sequences, even after immunization with a single antigen that induces a 10-fold increase in Tfol cell numbers. Thorough analysis of the sharing and network of TCR sequences revealed that a specific response to the immunizing antigen can only, but hardly, be detected in Tfh cells immunized with a foreign antigen and Tfr cells immunized with a self-antigen. These antigen-specific responses are obscured by a global stimulation of Tfh and Tfr cells that appears to be antigen-independent. Altogether, our results suggest a major bystander Tfol cell activation during the immune response in the GCs