Chapter 5 - Forwarding Dubpoetry in this Generation: A Grassroots Performance and Neo-Literary Genre in Transition

Summary

Contending with Kei Miller’s declaration in ‘A Smaller Sound, A Lesser Fury: A Eulogy for Dub Poetry’ that the genre has died, this essay uses the lens of transition to demonstrate the continued vitality of this Jamaican-rooted performance and neoliterary genre that serves political and aesthetic needs of the variously disempowered. The essay suggests Miller misconceives what dubpoetry is, threatening its vital social work and doing a disservice to the older generation of dubpoets and their inheritors. Providing evidence that the majority of first-generation dubpoets continue to create new work, collaborate, develop new subgenres, and teach, the essay offers close readings of work by dubpoetry’s heirs. Jamaican dubpoetry band The No-Maddz, Jamaican-British spoken word poet Raymond Antrobus and Canadian dub inheritors Klyde Broox, d’bi.young anitafrika and Kaie Kellough are shown to effect presentational, generic, thematic/political and media transitions in and from dubpoetry.