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25 - Black British Writing

Benjamin Zephaniah’s Didactic Poetics

from Part IV - Application

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2020

By
Deirdre Osborne
Edited by
Guido Rings  and
Sebastian Rasinger
Guido Rings
Affiliation:
Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge
Sebastian Rasinger
Affiliation:
Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge
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Summary

Deirdre Osborne examines Black British poetry as a distinctly aesthetic vehicle for catalysing intercultural communication. The chapter explores the concept of ‘Didactic Poetics’ in relation to intercultural communication as both ‘instructive’, that is teaching the reader how to read, listen and (re-)contemplate culture from minoritized perspectives, and ‘consequentialist’, in the sense that it speaks to a collective experience of the consequences of the British Empire’s aftermath and the inequalities caused by its legacy. In setting the parameters of cultural change from a frequently marginalized position in Britain’s institutions, Black British writers challenge canonical competencies to exert a palpable influence upon intercultural awareness. Of particular interest are Benjamin Zephaniah’s 1990s works City Psalms (1992), Propa Propaganda (1996) and School’s Out: Poems Not For School (1997), because they exemplify Spivak’s call to deconstruct the dominant cultural processes that denote knowledge value through ‘reversing, displacing, and seizing the apparatus of value-coding itself’ (1990), and to build coalitions of resistance and understanding (Lugones, 2007).

Keywords

intercultural communicationBlack British poetrydidactic poeticsZephaniahliteraturedecolonization
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Intercultural Communication , pp. 412 - 431
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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