Gissing and the Auditory Imagination: Language, Identity, and Estrangement in Born in Exile

An interest in language, and especially spoken language, is a well-established feature of Gissing's work. Born in Exile (1892), however, inscribes a new salience for Gissing's exploration of language as literary device, not least in its relation to the modelling of identity, as well as in the evolutionary tropes of adaptation which mark Godwin Peak's rise and fall. This essay examines Gissing's use of language as a device of exile and socio-cultural estrangement, paying particular attention to his interest in form as semiotic resource, alongside the indexicalities which both standard English and Cockney can be made to reveal. Gissing's auditory imagination emerges as a key tool in his depiction of the anxieties and fault lines of Victorian society.

Structural vulnerabilities and healthcare services integration

Home to one fifth of all people living with HIV, South Africa carries the world’s heaviest burden of this disease. While a significant proportion of those infected are immigrants from other African high-prevalence countries, little is known about how these migrants engage with healthcare systems in shifting cultural and clinical settings. This article draws on fieldwork from migrant communities and twenty-one ethnographic life histories told by HIV-positive Mozambicans in a major South African HIV clinic. From their collective narratives, a range of structural vulnerabilities are found that limit immigrants’ access to, and proper integration within, healthcare services. These include perilous migration, xenophobia and deportation, exclusion and exploitation, language barriers, medical pluralism, cultural estrangement, social isolation, and the stigmas of being HIV-positive. In conjunction, these structural factors may delay treatment-seeking and inhibit drug adherence, which could increase rates of morbidity and mortality as well as contribute to viral mutation and antiretroviral drug resistance.

Urban Transformation and Development-induced Displacement in the Informal Economy

This study examines the disconnection between effective communication and policy implementation in the lives of development-induced displaced persons in the informal economy in metropolitan Lagos. Development induced displacement has been seen as one of the largest categories of internal displacement affecting the urban poor. It occurs where coercion is employed and choices constrained. Evidence suggests that a large number of the people in the informal economy are affected and their experience has been extremely negative in cultural, economic, and health terms. The outcomes usually included lost of properties, displacement, unemployment, debt-bondage, hunger and cultural disintegration. The study was anchored on the cultural estrangement theory. The study was based on 10 sessions of Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) conducted with the affected people in Ijora-Badia, Mile 2 and Orile and 20 in-depth interview sessions with some of the displaced persons and officials of relevant agencies in the metropolis. The finding reveals lack of effective communication between the government officials and the displaced people, high-handedness on the part of government officials, lack of social support for the displaced people, high incidence of crime rate, high unemployment rate, dislocation of the informal economy, physical death, insecurity of life and property and psychological torture. The study therefore, recommends that the government should devise means for adequate compensation to avert a possible threat to ameliorate the suffering of informal economy operators. There is the need for government to enlighten and disseminate information about government policies to people operating in the informal sector in Lagos State.

Forms of Life for Meaghan Morris

Meaghan once remarked (I think to the poet and art critic Ken Bolton) that she didn’t like poetry because of all the empty space on the page. A quarter of a century ago in 1992, in Ecstasy and Economics: American Essays for John Forbes, she said she was ‘a desultory reader of poetry’ and that reading poetry might induce a ‘scary cultural estrangement’.1 In the foreword, she extrapolates the ‘awkward’ place of poetry in cultural studies then as being more an American problem than an Australian one but nearly a quarter of a century later I wonder if poetry has made an individuated local spot for itself, or even if it cares to. I mean, ‘should poetry worry?’

Development and Standardization of an Alienation Scale for Visually Impaired Students

Introduction The present study was undertaken to develop a valid and reliable scale for measuring a feeling of alienation in students with visual impairments (that is, those who are blind or have low vision). Methods In this study, a pool of 60 items was generated to develop an Alienation Scale for Visually Impaired Students (AL-VI) based on a review of the literature and discussions with colleagues and experts in the field. The items were organized into six dimensions of alienation, namely powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, social isolation, self-estrangement, and cultural estrangement, and were rated on the five-point Likert scale. The standardization of the scale was completed with 118 students with visual impairments in the age group of 10 to 25 years, selected randomly from specialized and inclusive schools in the state of Haryana, India. Results The item analysis was done by calculating t- and r-values; seven items were deleted, and a final 45 items were retained. The calculated value of Cronbach's alpha and split-half correlation came out to be 0.87 and 0.86, respectively. The construct validity was determined by computing the coefficient of correlation between scores of this scale and the scores obtained by using the Student Alienation scale (SAS) of R. R. Sharma (Sharma, 2012). The percentile norm for the scale was determined after verifying normality of the scores by using a Q-Q plot. Discussion The findings of the present study suggest that the AL-VI may serve as a useful tool in future research to assess alienation in persons with visual impairments in India. The findings further demonstrate that the AL-VI produced scores that are reliable and valid. The AL-VI can be used outside India after determining its reliability and validity in context-specific conditions. Implications for practitioners The AL-VI scale is applicable to students with visual impairments, teachers of students with visual impairments, principals, social workers, psychologists, and rehabilitation professionals. Practitioners could use this tool for assessing and understanding the level of alienation among students with visual impairments, thereby helping them in planning and executing strategies for remediating alienation.

The Secret of the Secret Chromatic Art

In 1946, just after emigrating from Nazi Germany via the Netherlands and Cuba to the United States, Edward Lowinsky published The Secret Chromatic Art in the Netherlands Motet. He posited a system of chromatic modulations through musica ficta in sixteenth-century Netherlandish polyphony circulated by clandestine heretic societies during the period of religious struggle in the Low Countries. According to Lowinsky, in the second half of the century a small contingent of northern musicians with radical Protestant sympathies wrote pieces that appeared on the surface to set texts and use diatonic melodies condoned by the Church. Beneath that compliant surface lurked secret chromaticism and seditious meanings that remained hidden from the Inquisition. Despite Lowinsky’s obvious interest in odd passages in motets of Clemens non Papa, Lassus, and others, I argue that his history as a Jew in Nazi Germany and then as an exile from that regime compelled his idiosyncratic hearing of sixteenth-century polyphony. A close reading of the text suggests that Lowinsky identified with the composers he wrote about and that he aligned Nazi Germany with the Catholic Inquisition. Beyond its engagement with music theory and cultural history, The Secret Chromatic Art delivers a modern narrative of oppressed minorities, authoritarian regimes, and the artistic triumph of the dispossessed. The Secret Chromatic Art matters today because its themes of displacement and cultural estrangement echo similar issues that Pamela Potter and Lydia Goehr have discerned in the work of other exiled musicians and scholars who migrated from Nazi-controlled Europe to the United States, and whose contributions helped shape our discipline. Moreover, Lowinsky’s theory figured prominently in the debate initiated by Joseph Kerman in the 1960s that pitted American criticism against German positivism, a polemic that is still with us today.