Punning in Punglish, Sounding ‘Poreign’
This essay explores Daljit Nagra's poetry – Look We Have Coming To Dover! (2007) and Tippoo Sultan's Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger-Toy Machine!!! (2011) – in the context of contemporary British language politics. It argues that Nagra's approach to language – combining heteroglot, multivoiced experimentalism with an etymological attention to the historical constructedness of language – offers a riposte to monolingual ideologies, which also resituates English as a product and residue of colonial history. While Nagra's poems sometimes come close to regarding the histories enfolded within English as a linguistic and poetic impasse, they continue to invest in the notion of resistance and individual agency in language; and specifically, they revel in poetic dramatization of the accommodations and convivialities of everyday multilingual language practice.
Moving world, moving voices: A discussion with Daljit Nagra
This interview explores a range of both emergent and persistent areas of interest in the work of Daljit Nagra. Nagra’s two latest books — Ramayana (2013) and British Museum (2017) — represent explorations of his interests in both “rootedness” — what it means to be connected or grounded in a cultural environment — and “route-edness” — what it means for cultures to travel and the impact of cultural journeying (Clifford, 1997). In both books he considers how cultures — both as individual and intertwined entities — in complex ways solidify and mutate; how they remain static and move. In this interview he explores his own shifting, layered, and sometimes uncomfortable relationship with diverse cultures, considering the extent to which and the means by which cultures “translate”. Underlining the inevitable clashes and dislocation such processes necessitate, via pluralism he identifies an essential desire for the meaningful connection of diverse cultures. Like the British Museum of the title of his most recent work, he sees the importance of his poetry as a project in human connectivity, asserting creative achievement, resilience, and value. In exploring these ideas, Nagra discusses the ways in which his work connects both to Indian culture in transition and translation and to canonical English Literature. This interview was conducted in Uxbridge, West London on 6 December 2018.
Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination
List of illustrations Acknowledgements Note on editions and abbreviations used Introduction: Dickens and the popular radical imagination 1. Popular radical culture in Regency England: Peterloo and The Queen Caroline Affair 2. Dickens and nineteenth-century show trials 3. Dickens, popular culture and popular politics in the 1830s: Oliver Twist 4. Christmas is cancelled: Dickens and Douglas Jerrold writing the 1840s 5. Popular and political writing in the radical press: from Douglas Jerrold to Ernest Jones, Chartist 6. Household Words, politics and the mass market in the 1850s 7. Flunkeyism and toadyism in the age of machinery: from Bleak House to Little Dorrit Notes Bibliography Index.