Jamaican-Canadian ‘Poetics of Relations’: Dub Poetry, Musical Rhythm, and Flows of Transnational Black Consciousness

Abstract

The article places dub poetry in the context of traveling sounds of music and oral poetry between the Caribbean, Canada, and England. Looking at dub poetry from a hemispheric and transnational perspective and through the lens of Glissant’s ‘poetics of Relations,’ the article puts focus on Canadian dub poetry and relates it to Jamaican beginnings and diasporic extensions in Britain. As the article shows, dub poetry plays a key role as transnational and transgeneric sound archive (Antwi) and as poetic form of yearning for completion, thus adding new narratives to a larger discourse of Black transnationalism that is by no means limited or necessarily linked to “pan-Africanism or other kinds of Black-isms”. Instead, dub poetry also responds to all kinds of international movements such as anti-colonialism, socialism and feminism to create transnational imaginaries and historiographies of diasporic Black cultures.