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Serological testing for antibodies directed against SARS-CoV-2 in patients may serve as a diagnostic tool to verify a previous infection and as surrogate for an elicited humoral immune response, ideally conferring immunity after infection or vaccination. Here, we present the recombinant expression of an extended receptor binding domain (RBD) of the SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein used as capture antigen in a unique rapid immunoassay to detect the presence of RBD binding antibodies with high sensitivity and specificity. As currently available vaccines focus on the Spike RBD as target, the developed test can also be used to monitor a successful immune response after vaccination with an RBD based vaccine.

Abstract – This chapter focuses on relevant novels by contemporary black British writers, novels which represent the condition of exile, uprootedness and ‘in-betweenness’ experienced by the first and the second generation of migrants who arrived in Great Britain from colonized or once colonized-countries in the second half of the 20th century. Creative writing presents itself as a privileged area of investigation of the problematic question of belonging and of identity negotiations. The new fluid and hybrid identities which emerge out of the inevitable processes of contamination between different worlds and cultures – identities ‘positioned’ by the interaction of different historical, political and cultural factors – challenge the binary dichotomies at the very roots of Western civilization dismantling the myth of a homogeneous and static Englishness based on the traditional opposition between Self and Other. Through the novels taken into examination mostly by writers born and/or bred in England whose identities are enriched by different ethnic roots, the chapter will reflect upon the concept of cultural diversity and on the problematic issue of multiculturalism: a model which has undoubtedly revealed its flaws. The question of cultural identity stands out as a relevant common thread and is explored in its most different declinations, from the suffered sense of uprootedness and alienation to the celebration of hybridism, from generational conflicts to adherence to forms of fundamentalism, from the attempt to assimilate to the enthusiastic celebration of diversity. All the novels selected for analysis reveal both in narrative form and content a diasporic connotation and a dialogic afflatus which is aimed at prefiguring a ‘new world order’ whose objective is a more equitable and caring society ready not simply to accept and tolerate but to appreciate and cultivate its fruitful, precious diversity.

Abstract – This paper will analyze the ‘historical’ novel Gould’s Book of Fish (2001) by the Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan with the aim of reflecting upon the power of the creative word as a means to forge reality, shape identities, mask or unmask truths, and also to prefigure a different, alternative world order based on commonly negotiated and thus shared values. The postmodernist revisiting of the traditional genre of the historical novel does not compromise the postcolonial commitment of the writer: Flanagan’s incursions into the Australian colonial past are informed by his concern for urgent social and political causes which has characterized his unswerving fight against all systems of inequality and exploitation. In his novel, the subversion of the linear causal relation of events which calls into question the truthfulness and objectivity of history, together with the foregrounded metanarrative reflection on the art of writing, contribute to the revisiting and re-discussing of the myth of progress and the cult of rationality at the very roots of Western civilization and of its imperialistic enterprise. Flanagan’s ‘anti-historical’ historical novel tackles urgent questions about modernity interrogating the founding narratives of the Australian national identity, in order to explore the uncontrollable and shifting areas of the contemporary ‘transnation’ in which the traditional categories shaping subjectivities are disrupted. As the paper will demonstrate, the writer digs into the past of his nation not simply in order to unravel its hidden histories but to detect the profound, inextricable interconnections with the present across different times and spaces. Feelings and experiences that exist above and beyond historical contingencies and cultural differences represent the writer’s privileged area of investigation as they trespass upon conventional and artificial boundaries revealing what it is that makes us all human.