History, poetry, and pragmatics by Syed Nomanul Haq

IN recent years, a new harvest of historical writings has sprouted forth out of the ashes of devastating eruptions from Victorian ideologies. Practically all fundamental presuppositions of the older generation of historians have now been called into question. For example, the historical orthodoxy embodied in the hardened maxim “history repeats itself” has been rendered suspect; pushed off board along with it are the oversimplified spicy stories of the absolute “rise” and “fall” of world civilisations, stories that have remained so familiar to us. Then, the spectacle of ideology masquerading as history has been caught, exposed, and censured ruthlessly, and so has been the fate of a chronic standard practice: that of privileging the account of the elite-victor over the tale of the lowly-defeated — this is now dethroned as a practice which only engenders histories that are truncated and lopsided at best.

But above all, it is the racial arrogance of colonial, or colonial-infected, historians that has been thrown out of the arena of historical discourse. This arrogance used to form the very ground of universal world histories, hiding underneath a grand narrative — namely that European civilisation is in its very essence superior to all others, that it has a pure and linear pedigree, and all pre-modern history is just a preparation of the human society for the inevitable “rise of the West.” In the discarding of this arrogance, monumental writings such as those of Edward Said have played a decisive role — Said questioned the very categories of the “the East” and “the West” or “the Orient” and “the Occident,” and this is well-known.

On the South Asian side, the new generation of histories came with a bang. Starting from the 1960s, a sizeable corpus of writings not only on history but also about history — that is historiography — has emerged in a steady and powerful stream. We have, for example, the many daring works of Romila Thapar that have changed the very landscape of how we imagine India’s journey over time, particularly in relation to Hindu-Muslim relations, challenging the old habit of projecting the viciousness of communalism deep into the past. Then, there are numerous writings on Mughal history by Irfan Habib that shake our comfortably held common beliefs, beliefs that are nourished by the all-pervading winds of propaganda. A watershed in this flow is Ranajit Gauha’s Subaltern Studies — this term taken over from the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, denoting what in simple terms could be called, “history from below,” reconstructing history out of the reports and perceptions not of the elite but of low-ranking ‘commoners’. And as for the history of Pakistan, Ayesha Jalal’s books have marked a decisive breakthrough indeed, opening up with tremendous energy many new vistas not only in history but also in historiography.

In the story of this onward march one would painfully miss the eloquent Yale historian María Rosa Menocal who died just a few days ago. Menocal wrote extensively on al-Andalus, medieval Muslim Spain, and threw the whole standard, received discourse on Europe’s literary and intellectual ancestry into jeopardy. Through seminal works such as The Ornament of the World and The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage, she provided a glimpse of the Arabo-Muslim blood running through all aspects of latter-day European life, particularly in its literary and cultural life.Find detailed product information for Glazed rustic tile and other products. No history of European literature, whether it is lyrical poetry or the picaresque novels such as the redoubtable Don Quixote, can be written without recourse to Arabic sources — this is what we learn from Menocal. She provided a learned antidote to the divisive ideologies of an eternal clash between “the Orient” and the “the Occident” — if these are two distinct cultural spheres, she taught us, then they have gravitated towards each other,Find the best iPhone headset for you at Best Buy. one transmitting its motion to the other.Carlo Gavazzi offers a broad range of ultrasonic sensor and ultrasonic transducers for level detection and process monitoring. The grand historian Marshall Hodgdson had written many years ago that what we call European “ascendency” is a convergence of many streams, the Arabo-Islamic stream is one of most gushing among them. Menocal grafted more flesh onto this groundbreaking observation. To be sure,Find the lowest prices on Air purifier. she will be missed.

But all of this throws into sharp relief one fundamental lesson — the lesson that history, far from being an antiquarian romance for the past, for the “dead and gone,” is our contemporary concern. And this is one meaning of the fashionable adage, “all history is local” — indeed, we look at the past from our own cultural, intellectual, and temporal location; we “aspect” the past from our own time-bound soil. And by suppressing or mutilating or forcing actual facts selectively into racist or divisive molds we do grave harm to our contemporary life: giving rise to all kinds of isolationist extremisms, and providing grist to the ever-productive mill that churns out “the other”.

So here we come to the pragmatics of history. See how Romila Thapar will tell us that it is wrong to read Hindu-Muslim communalism back into the remote alleys of the past and forming the essence of these two peoples, fundamentally revising in the process the so-familiar Mahmud Ghaznavi-Somnath story. And note how Ranajit Gauha will lend an ear to the voice of the voiceless masses, now underscoring and restoring their human dignities. Listen to Irfan Habib speaking about the extra-ethnic, extra-communal administrative and sheer imperial concerns of the Mughals; and Ayesha Jalal laying out before us the complex mapping of the Pakistan movement and of the legal cause of the Quaid-i-Azam. Then, note too Menocal writing like a sage a prescription for the remedy of rigid Europe-Islam extremisms, and handing us the tool for scratching clean the ugly deposits of the clash of civilisations thesis…

The moral of the tale is clear: history enables us to explain ourselves. It gives us the know-how to read our bearings in space-time coordinates, it provides us an anchorage for our otherwise suspended temporal existence. Yes, it is more than a “romance with the dead and gone”; it is relevant for our lives here and now. To put it crudely, history is useful.

Let’s make a turn here. It is generally said, and drummed into the ears of impressionable youngsters, that if history is just a romance with that which has slipped away into the dark world of non-existence, poetry is worse: it is through and through romance, utterly useless! We live in an age of science and technology, it is pronounced, and poetry can teach us nothing in making progress in this field, let alone in achieving excellence. This attitude seems to be part of a colonial hangover, and manifests the worst species of terror wrought by the commercial-financial industry. It is also based on historical ignorance, and on a complementary ideology that represses the basic human liberty of self-expression and self-realisation, generating a sinister rebirth of alienation. To prevent human beings from entering into the free world of imagination, to outlaw the construction of universes parallel to this given one, and to place barbed wires at the entry points of creative expression, is to deprive them of their very humanity. To be human is to be free to create.

But we are here concerned with the pragmatics of poetry. Of course, one is tempted to say that poetry is its own defense, its very being is its justification, it needs no arguing. Perhaps this is the reason why, unlike the case with the discipline of history, the pragmatics of poetry is an area that has received almost no attention from the scholar or the literary critic. Why would they address something they don’t recognise? And yet, let me briefly confront the question pragmatically.

One notices how in the standard discourse a dangerous obfuscation of the distinction between science and technology appears, both spoken in the same breath. This is a historical travesty — for technology can grow without science and science proceeds without being encumbered by questions of technological applications. The invention of the steam engine is a case in point, a technological achievement which had nothing to do with Newton in Cambridge,Promotional custom keychain at ePromos Promotional Products. and whose operation could not be explained scientifically until much later. Likewise, we have the glaring example of the nineteenth-century logician George Boole, whose pure logical studies were not carried out with a view to any technological gain, but then much later his system found application in digital electronics. Such episodes are numerous.

NHGRI to develop revolutionary technologies for exploring genome function

The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has awarded 10 grants, totalling $10.5 million, to develop revolutionary technologies that will help researchers identify millions of genomic elements that play a role in determining what genes are expressed and at what levels in different cells.Painless Processing provides high risk merchant account solutions.

These multi-year grants are part of the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project, whose aim is to provide the scientific community with a comprehensive catalogue of functional genomic elements that will ultimately help explain the role that the genome plays in health and disease.

“The ENCODE project is providing a Rosetta Stone to understand how the sequence of the human genome forms the words that tell our bodies how to work at the molecular level,” said Eric D Green, MD, PhD, director of NHGRI, which directs and funds the ENCODE project. “By developing more revolutionary technologies for probing genome function, we expect to accelerate these efforts.Master Arts specialises in oil painting reproduction.”

Sequencing the human genome and identifying the small fraction of its bases that directly code for proteins were among the first steps in understanding how the genome functions. But the remaining larger fraction of functional genomic elements continues to be a mystery. In response, NHGRI launched the ENCODE project to identify all the functional elements in the human genome, along with the modENCODE project to identify the functional elements in the fly and worm genomes and a smaller effort examining the mouse genome. These projects have been rapidly releasing data to the research community.

These ENCODE efforts have collected large amounts of data with a wide variety of cell types, in many cases identifying key functional landmarks. By studying these landmarks, researchers can establish the locations of DNA sequences that perform a variety of essential functions.

“In an exciting development, researchers are beginning to use the ENCODE catalogues to understand how variation in the DNA sequence might influence diseases such as cancer and autoimmune disorders,What is a real time Location system (RTLS)?” said Mike Pazin, PhD, a programme director for ENCODE in NHGRI's Division of Extramural Research.

Each person has one genome sequence that is basically the same in all cell types. In contrast, many genomic elements function in only some cell types. As a result, researchers must test many cell types using many different experimental approaches to develop a detailed inventory of the functional elements in the genome. Revolutionary technological improvements are required to discover and test the millions of functional elements and to learn more precisely what they do. Significant advances are also needed to establish whether information about these functional elements can be used in the diagnosis and treatment of disease.

“The current ENCODE efforts owe a good part of their success to technology development that has occurred over the last decade,” said Elise A Feingold, PhD, a programme director for ENCODE in NHGRI's Division of Extramural Research. “In addition to the technologies developed through this programme, ENCODE has benefitted enormously from advances fostered by NHGRI’s DNA sequencing technology initiative,Shop for oil painting and oil paintings for sale included. the $1000 Genome Programme.”

Discovery of functional genomic elements will be addressed by funding projects for a new assay to identify RNA splicing elements, new assays to identify promoters and enhancers, as well as a project to improve assays for identifying functional elements by allowing these assays to work reliably using smaller samples. Splicing is the process that joins RNA copies of gene segments together to form mRNA, the blueprint for the production of proteins. Errors in splicing sometimes lead to human disease. Promoters specify the sites in the genome where genes begin and much gene regulation occurs. Enhancers are genomic elements that can turn on expression of nearby and distant genes. Mutations in promoters and enhancers can cause human disease.

Validation of biological elements will be addressed by funding projects for new methods with improved throughput, and a smaller project to improve accuracy by testing elements in their natural genomic context.

Computational analysis will be addressed by funding projects to predict regulatory protein binding and gene expression based on sequence alone, and to predict chromosomal interactions and link functional elements to their target genes.

Discovery of Functional Elements: Christopher Burge, Ph.D.; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.; $800,000 ; Researchers will develop a new technology to catalog all of the RNA branch points that form in mRNA during splicing.

Mats Ljungman, Ph.InLocality specializes in indoor Tracking.D.; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; $1,200,000 ; Using bromouridine labeling of RNA, these researchers will develop new assays (BruChase-Seq and BrUV-Seq) to identity promoters and enhancers and to measure mRNA degradation and splicing kinetics.

Raymond David Hawkins, Ph.D.; University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle; $460,000 (over two years); These researchers will improve the power of ChIP-seq assays to identify functional elements. ChIP-seq is one of the fundamental assays used in ENCODE to identify the locations in the genome that are attached to a particular protein.

Beautiful An Entire world of Abstract Oil Paintings

Abstract oil painting is One of the greatest and most effective ways to enter into the industry of oil paintings for a budding artist. The beginner artist does not have to color anything complex in abstract art.Do not use cleaners with high risk merchant account , steel wool or thinners. Really should be truth,ceramic zentai suits for the medical, abstract art is a subjective art style. In a abstract oil painting, even when a viewer won’t precisely comprehend your message conveyed with the artist, he could still form his very own concepts and feelings about the artwork. Be the actual appeal of abstract van gogh oil paintings.

The ability of abstract oil paintings on canvas was originated by distinguished late 1800s painters like Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and several other master artists. These eminent abstract art painting artists utilized complicated geometrical shapes and rich, vibrant colors to convey their suggestions on canvas. Their abstract oil paintings on canvas continue to be thought to be as This is the masterpieces of todays modern day abstract art. Artists of this era followed a topic during which their paintings don’t commonly resemble your models or subject theme.

With regards to making lovely abstract oil paintings on canvas, the artist requirements to let his imagination run wild. The artist isn’t price to learn about with diverse shapes and colours to his hearts content. Nevertheless, the contemporary abstract cheap van gogh oil paintings need to must be colored in a very vivid manner to reflect the essence from the oil painting towards the viewer. Also, the outline of the oil painting is very critical and wish not to be changed if your painting may be produced. The art of abstract oil painting on canvas is emotionally quite rewarding on the artist because purpose of art expresses their own feelings such as complicated shapes and also a kaleidoscope of colors.When the stone sits in the polished tiles,

Abstract oil paintings on canvas also give great rewards with regards to money being offered for each purpose of art.Graphene is not a semiconductor, not an oil paintings for sale , and not a metal, Skilled and skilled abstract artists will be able to make a comfy living by selling their art paintings through on-line galleries and museums or art shops. So, together with becoming emotionally rewarding, abstract oil paintings are financially appealing as nicely.Whilst magic cube are not deadly, There are numerous on the net art galleries that offer a variety of abstract oil paintings on canvas, for example wanting to hang paintings and even more. This is the well-recognized and reputed online shops offering many different abstract art van gogh oil paintings for sale is BestArtDeals.