Penguinizing dub: Paratextual frames for transnational protest in Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Mi Revalueshanary Fren

Abstract

The publication of Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Penguin Modern Classics collection of poetry Mi Revalueshanary Fren (2002) has reignited debates concerning the literary qualities of dub poetry and its need for political contextualization. While Johnson’s poems have traditionally been read as enunciating the alienation and agitation of a generation of almost exclusively black Britons in the 1970s and 1980s, this article argues that his Modern Classics text unfetters his poetry from such a strictly located and oppositional historical context. By examining Penguin’s paratextual framing of the collection’s 1980s verse, it explores the ways in which Mi Revalueshanary Fren offers a refiguration of Johnson’s incendiary poetics, one that unearths a more meditative rhetoric of transnational and translocal protest. Penguin’s paratextual reframing of Johnson’s poetry marks a process of what is termed here “Penguinizing dub”, which enables new thresholds of interpretation that engage the material circumstances of the text’s publication with the enduring, 21st-century textuality of Johnson’s verses.