This is the first book-length study of dub poetry, the musical talkover that has been an important part of the reggae scene in Canada, Britain and of course the Caribbean since the 1970's. Christian Habekost 's qualifications for writing such a book are beyond dispute. He is a German poet who has been involved with the dub movement since it began and knows most of its leading figures. As Ranting Chako, he is featured on the LP Dread Poets Society. The bibliography indicates that he has interviewed many of the 43 poet-performers mentioned, often on several occasions. Verbal Riddim, based on his doctoral dissertation at the University of Mannheim, is a successful blend of the performer and the researcher.

This book develops a theory of multimodality – the participation of a text in more than one mode – centred on the poetry/poetics of Lillian Allen, Claire Harris, Dionne Brand, and Marlene Nourbese Philip. How do these poets represent oral Caribbean English Creoles (CECs) in writing and negotiate the relationship between the high literary in Canadian letters and the social and historical meanings of CECs? How do the latter relate to the idea of “female and black”? Through fluid use of code- and mode-switching, the movement of Brand and Philip between creole and standard English, and written orality and standard writing forms part of their meanings. Allen’s eye-spellings precisely indicate stereotypical creole sounds, yet use the phonological system of standard English. On stage, Allen projects a black female body in the world and as a speaking subject. She thereby shows that the implication of the written in the literary excludes her body’s language (as performance); and she embodies her poetry to realize a ‘language’ alternative to the colonizing literary. Harris’s creole writing helps her project a fragmented personality, a range of dialects enabling quite different personae to emerge within one body. Thus Harris, Brand, Philip, and Allen both project the identity “female and black” and explore this social position in relation to others. Considering textual multimodality opens up a wide range of material connections. Although written, this poetry is also oral; if oral, then also embodied; if embodied, then also participating in discourses of race, gender, sexuality, and a host of other systems of social organization and individual identity. Finally, the semiotic body as a mode (i.e. as a resource for making meaning) allows written meanings to be made that cannot otherwise be expressed in writing. In every case, Allen, Philip, Harris, and Brand escape the constraints of dominant media, refiguring language via dialect and mode to represent a black feminist sensibility.

The follow-up to the groundbreaking Black Queer Studies, the edited collection No Tea, No Shade brings together nineteen essays from the next generation of scholars, activists, and community leaders doing work on black gender and sexuality. Building on the foundations laid by the earlier volume, this collection's contributors speak new truths about the black queer experience while exemplifying the codification of black queer studies as a rigorous and important field of study. Topics include "raw" sex, pornography, the carceral state, gentrification, gender nonconformity, social media, the relationship between black feminist studies and black trans studies, the black queer experience throughout the black diaspora, and queer music, film, dance, and theater. The contributors both disprove naysayers who believed black queer studies to be a passing trend and respond to critiques of the field's early U.S. bias. Deferring to the past while pointing to the future, No Tea, No Shade pushes black queer studies in new and exciting directions. Contributors. Jafari S. Allen, Marlon M. Bailey, Zachary Shane Kalish Blair, La Marr Jurelle Bruce, Cathy J. Cohen, Jennifer DeClue, Treva Ellison, Lyndon K. Gill, Kai M. Green, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Kwame Holmes, E. Patrick Johnson, Shaka McGlotten, Amber Jamilla Musser, Alison Reed, Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, Tanya Saunders, C. Riley Snorton, Kaila Story, Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley, Julia Roxanne Wallace, Kortney Ziegler

Questions of genres as well as their possible definitions, taxonomies, and functions have been discussed since antiquity. Even though categories of genre today are far from being fixed, they have for decades been upheld without question. The goal of this volume is to problematize traditional definitions of poetic genres and to situate them in a broader socio-cultural, historical, and theoretical context. The contributions encompass numerous methodological approaches (including hermeneutics, poststructuralism, reception theory, cultural studies, gender studies), periods (Romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism), genres (elegy, sonnet, visual poetry, performance poetry, hip hop) as well as languages and national literatures. From this interdisciplinary and multi-methodological perspective, genres, periods, languages, and literatures are put into fruitful dialogue, new perspectives are discovered, and suggestions for further research are provided.

Drawing on literary, musical, and visual representations of and by Rastafari, Darren J. N. Middleton provides an introduction to Rasta through the arts, broadly conceived. The religious underpinnings of the Rasta movement are often overshadowed by Rasta’s association with reggae music, dub, and performance poetry. Rastafari and the Arts: An Introduction takes a fresh view of Rasta, considering the relationship between the artistic and religious dimensions of the movement in depth. Middleton’s analysis complements current introductions to Afro-Caribbean religions and offers an engaging example of the role of popular culture in illuminating the beliefs and practices of emerging religions. Recognizing that outsiders as well as insiders have shaped the Rasta movement since its modest beginnings in Jamaica, Middleton includes interviews with members of both groups, including: Ejay Khan, Barbara Makeda Blake Hannah, Geoffrey Philp, Asante Amen, Reggae Rajahs, Benjamin Zephaniah, Monica Haim, Blakk Rasta, Rocky Dawuni, and Marvin D. Sterling.

Preliminary Material -- Introduction -- Key Challenges for the Scholar of Live Poetry -- Towards a Definition of Live Poetry -- Analysing Live Poetry -- Audiotext -- Body Communication -- Contextualising the Performance -- Jackie Hagan's “Coffee or Tea?”: A Sample Analysis -- Checklist for the Analysis of Live Poetry Performances -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Table of Figures -- Index.

This lovely book of poetry brings together over 100 of the most celebrated and cherished poems of the 20th century. Including poets as diverse as John Betjeman and Ted Hughes, Siegfried Sassoon and Allan Ahlberg, and subjects from all avenues of life - war, family life, love, death, religion, the countryside, animals and comedy - the whole breadth of the nation's life during the 20th century is encapsulated here. Compiled and edited by Griff Rhys Jones as part of the successful The Nations Favourite Poems series, this book brings together the wealth of new and innovative poetry styles that flourished in the 20th Century.

Discussing the work of more than 60 poets from the US, UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and the Caribbean, Nerys Williams guides students through the key ideas and movements in the study of poetry today.

Traditional histories of Black letters in Latin America have delimited their geographic scope to the Caribbean while also omitting intertwined Afro-Indigenous discourses. Inspired by the legacy of Amefrican thinker Lélia Gonzalez, Améfrica in Letters highlights the Black poets, songwriters, novelists, essayists, and bloggers who have created a counter-multiculturalist literary history on the Latin American mainland. To capture a sense of the variety of their contributions, this book spans Mexico, Central America, the Andes, and the Southern Cone—highlighting the transcontinental nature of the legacy of Black writing and its impact beyond national boundaries. The writers examined in the volume engage with regional intellectual frameworks while putting into circulation a demand for a recalibration of the Hispanophone and Lusophone contexts in which they and other Afrodescendants reside.