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The Avant-Garde is in the Audience: On the Popular Avant-Gardism of Linton Kwesi Johnson's Dub Poetry
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2019
Abstract
This article presents a historical study of black British poet and recording artist Linton Kwesi Johnson. Drawing on archival research, I argue that Johnson's hybrid literary and reggae-based practice, known as ‘dub poetry’, offers fresh insight into the status of ‘the popular’ in histories and theories of the avant-garde, and of black avant-gardism specifically. I begin by discussing Johnson's participation in the Caribbean Artists Movement, a hub for diasporic arts in 1960–70s London, whereupon I show how dub poetry transposed the ideas of Johnson's colleague, pan-African Marxist C. L. R. James, in simultaneously documenting and instigating grassroots efforts at community centres where Johnson worked, notably the Race Today Collective. I contend that Johnson forged a cultural programme that paralleled James's well-known rejection of the elitist model of the political vanguard: Johnson furnished a ‘popular avant-garde’, as I call it, whose community-oriented ethos was realized via popular media like the LP and mass-democratic – populist – action campaigns.
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Footnotes
Some of the research that led to this article was presented at the national meeting of the American Musicological Society, the biennial conference of the North American British Music Studies Association, and the Precarious Sounds/Sounding Sanctuary conference at New York University. For their comments and critiques of a previous draft of this article or the ideas that went into it, the author wishes to thank Eric Drott, Alejandro L. Madrid, Aurora Masum-Javed, Benjamin Piekut, Maxwell Williams, and the anonymous reviewers of this journal.
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