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.
Multicultural Poetry: On Filigrees, Grafting, and Mirrors
Rahbek reads poetry by Elaine Feinstein, Daljit Nagra, and Jackie Kay with a special focus on metaphors and imagery. The chapter takes a point of departure in the contrasting vocabularies and conceptualisations of British multiculturalism discourses. It explores myriad attempts at defining what multiculturalism signifies before it goes on to read the poems ‘Migrations’, ‘Look we Have Coming to Dover!’, and ‘Moss Side Mirrors’ in detail. Paying particular attention to the rich connotative power of the poetic metaphors of filigrees, grafting, and mirrors, the chapter argues that poetry and poetic imagery ought to be an integral part of the representational space of British multiculturalism since it offers ways of thinking more playfully about the convivial and conflictual state of contemporary superdiverse Britain.
UV-B radiometry and dosimetry for solar measurements.
Biologically effective irradiance or dose of solar UV radiation was determined using a spectroradiometer, two broadband radiometers and two types of passive UV-dosimeters. The absolute erythema irradiance and the actinic irradiance were calculated from the solar spectrum measured with the spectroradiometer. It was demonstrated that the erythema irradiance is proportional to the actinic irradiance of solar radiation. The erythema irradiance was also determined using the two broadband radiometers which utilize a filter transmitting erythema spectra. Personal UV-dosimeters such as polysulphone and CR-39 were used to determine the erythema dose for a selected period of time. These results were used to estimate the accuracy of the broadband radiometers and UV-dosimeters. It was found that the results obtained from the broadband radiometers deviate from the absolute erythema irradiance by less than 20% during clear days between the hours of 11:00 and 13:00 Eastern Standard Time (EST) in Australia. The assessment of the erythema dose using passive dosimeters such as polysulphone and CR-39 could introduce an error as high as 40% if the calibration was not performed before undertaking experimental measurements.