Degree Year

2013

Document Type

Thesis - Open Access

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Africana Studies

Committee Member(s)

Meredith Gadsby, Chair
Gordon Gill
Caroline Jackson Smith

Keywords

African American studies, Black studies, Caribbean literature, Caribbean studies, Ethnic studies, History, Literature, Minority and ethnic groups, Music

Abstract

In the mid-1970s, a collective of Jamaican poets from Kingston to London began to use reggae as a foundational aesthetic to their poetry. Inspired by the rise of reggae music and the work of the Caribbean Artists Movement based London from 1966 to 1972, these artists took it upon themselves to continue the dialogue on Caribbean cultural production. This research will explore the ways in which dub poetry created an expressive space for Jamaican artists to complicate discussions of migration and colonialism in the transnational Caribbean experience.

In order to do so, this research engages historical, ethnomusicological, and literary theories to develop a framework to analyze dub poetry. It will primarily pose the question, how did these dub poets expand the archives of Caribbean national production? This paper will suggest that by facilitating a dialogue among Jamaicans located between London and Kingston, dub poetry expanded the archives for Caribbean cultural production. In this expansion, dub poetry's simultaneous combination of literary and sound genius not only repositioned geographical boundaries of Jamaican identity but also grounded the intersecting spaces of the written, spoken, recorded, and performed word.

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