'Race and Antiracism in Black British and British Asian Literature' offers the first extended exploration of the cultural impact of the politics of race and antiracism in Britain through focussing on ...a selection of recent novels by black British and British Asian writers. The study argues that an understanding of how race and ethnicity function in contemporary Britain can only be gained through attention to antiracism: the politics of opposing discrimination that manifest at the level of state legislation, within local and national activism, and inside the scholarly exploration of race. It is antiracism that now most strongly conditions the emergence of racial categorisations but also of racial identities and models of behaviour. This sense of how antiracism may determine the form and content of both political debate and individual identity is traced through an examination of ten novels by black British and British Asian writers. These authors range from the well known to the critically neglected: works by Monica Ali, Nadeem Aslam, Fred D’Aguiar, Ferdinand Dennis, Hanif Kureishi, Gautam Malkani, Caryl Phillips, Mike Phillips, Zadie Smith, and Meera Syal are carefully read to explore the impacts of antiracism. These literary studies are grouped into three main themes, each of which is central to the direction of racial political identities over the last two decades in Britain: the use of the continent of Africa as a symbolic focus for black political culture; the changing forms of Muslim culture in Britain; and the emergence of a multiculturalist ethos based around the notion of ethnic communities.
Introduces an array of fiction and poetry, examining how writers from Africa, Australasia, the Caribbean, Canada, Ireland, and South Asia have engaged with the challenges that beset postcolonial ...societies. Discusses many of the most-studied works of postcolonial literature, fromDisgrace, throughThings Fall AparttoWhite Teeth.
From Shakey the Robot to self‐driving cars, from the personal computer to personal assistants on our phones, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has led the development of ...integrated artificial intelligence (AI) systems for more than half a century. From the earliest days of AI, it was apparent that a robust, generally intelligent system should include a complete set of capabilities: perception, memory, reasoning, learning, planning, and action; and when DARPA initiated AI research in the 1960s, ambitious projects such as Shakey the Robot went after the complete package. As DARPA realized the challenges, they backed away from the ultimate goal of integrated AI and tried to make progress on the individual problems of image understanding, speech and language understanding, knowledge representation and reasoning, planning and decision aids, machine learning, and robotic manipulation. Yet, even as researchers struggled to make progress in these subdisciplines, DARPA periodically resurrected the challenge of integrated intelligent systems and pushed the community to try again. In the 1980s, DARPA's Strategic Computing Initiative took on challenges of integrated AI projects such as the Autonomous Land Vehicle and the Pilot's Associate. These did not succeed, but instead set the stage for the several decades of more siloed research that followed, until it was time to try again. In the 2000s, DARPA took on the integrated AI problem again with its Grand Challenges, which led to the first self‐driving cars, and projects such as the Personalized Assistant that Learns, which produced Apple's Siri. These efforts created complex, richly‐integrated systems that represented quantum leaps ahead in machine intelligence. The integration of sophisticated capabilities in a fundamental way is the key to general intelligence. This is the story of DARPA's persistent long‐term support for this essential premise of AI.
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.
In the last decade, three novels by African-British authors have been published that portray characters who could be seen as presenting symptoms of dissociative disorder: Aminatta Forna's The Memory ...of Love (2010), Helen Oyeyemi's The Icarus Girl (2005), and Brian Chikwava's Harare North (2009). In each of them, an alternative explanatory framework of spirit possession is also explored. This essay examines what is at stake in juxtaposing such “African” and “Western” viewpoints within the fictional form. It finds that while Forna's novel largely conforms to a traditional model of traumatic experience, the non-realist writing of Oyeyemi and, especially, Chikwava might be seen as disrupting the trauma paradigm, not in order to replace it with an Africa-centered perspective, but rather to explore the fictional potential of divorcing the “trauma aesthetic” from the actual experience of trauma.
Gunnin focuses on black British fiction. He reviews how some recent criticism has associated the realist novel with conservative representations of ethnic communities in Britain. He argues instead ...that form is less significant in understanding the portrayal of ethnic or racial difference than an imagined relationship between characters, author, and reader that relies upon a notion of ethnic authenticity. Furthermore, he suggests that in the recent work of three varied writers (Monica Ali, Caryl Phillips, and Hari Kunzru), people see attempts to replace the comfortable knowledge afforded by the crutch of "authenticity" with an address to the language and boundaries of empathy.
Inquire Biology is a prototype of a new kind of intelligent textbook — one that answers students' questions, engages their interest, and improves their understanding. Inquire Biology provides unique ...capabilities through a knowledge representation that captures conceptual knowledge from the textbook and uses inference procedures to answer students' questions. Students ask questions by typing free‐form natural language queries or by selecting passages of text. The system then attempts to answer the question and also generates suggested questions related to the query or selection. The questions supported by the system were chosen to be educationally useful, for example: what is the structure of X? compare X and Y? how does X relate to Y? In user studies, students found this question‐answering capability to be extremely useful while reading and while doing problem solving. In an initial controlled experiment, community college students using the Inquire Biology prototype outperformed students using either a hard copy or conventional ebook version of the same biology textbook. While additional research is needed to fully develop Inquire Biology, the initial prototype clearly demonstrates the promise of applying knowledge representation and question‐answering technology to electronic textbooks.
This article examines Daljit Nagra's recent poetry collection Look We Have Coming to Dover! in relation to the idea of the burden of representation placed upon minority writers. While Nagra has been ...lionized as “the voice of British Asian poetry”, his verse actually serves to question the homogenization of diverse individuals and communities implied within such labelling. The collection consists of a mix of confessional poetry and dramatic monologues, and is marked by repeated quotation from and parody of the English poetic tradition as well as a linguistic inventiveness in portraying the voices of British Punjabis: the article suggests that each of these aspects can be seen as part of Nagra's attempt to engage with his anxieties of influence. Crucially, these anxieties must be understood not only in the Bloomian sense of the writer's relation to tradition, but also as formed by the discursive expectations of a society structured by racialization.
The fall and winter issues of AI Magazine present articles on some of the most interesting projects at the intersection of AI and education. Included are articles on integrated systems such as ...virtual humans, an intelligent textbook, and a game-based learning environment as well as technology-focused components such as student models and data mining. This issue concludes with an article summarizing the contemporary and emerging challenges at the intersection of Al and education.
The Need to Belong Gunning, Dave
Postcolonial Literature,
09/2013
Book Chapter
The last chapter ended with an address of some of the ways in which Keri Hulme introduces Maori concepts intoThe Bone People.Struggles for recognition of indigenous languages have been an important ...aspect of the movements for First Nation rights in the last few decades, but by no means the only cause which indigenous peoples such as the Maori in Aotearoa New Zealand, the Aborigines of Australia and Native American and Canadian groups have embraced in the fight to have their understandings of the world granted legal status and their rights honoured on their own terms, not just those
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