'Vernacular Voices: Black British Poetry'

ABSTRACT Black British poetry is the province of experimenting with voice and recording rhythms beyond the iambic pentameter. Not only in performance poetry and through the spoken word, but also on the page, black British poetry constitutes and preserves a sound archive of distinct linguistic varieties. In Slave Song (1984) and Coolie Odyssey (1988), David Dabydeen employs a form of Guyanese Creole in order to linguistically render and thus commemorate the experience of slaves and indentured labourers, respectively, with the earlier collection providing annotated translations into Standard English. James Berry, Louise Bennett, and Valerie Bloom adapt Jamaican Patois to celebrate Jamaican folk culture and at times to represent and record experiences and linguistic interactions in the postcolonial metropolis. Grace Nichols and John Agard use modified forms of Guyanese Creole, with Nichols frequently constructing gendered voices whilst Agard often celebrates linguistic playfulness. The borders between linguistic varieties are by no means absolute or static, as the emergence and marked growth of ‘London Jamaican’ (Mark Sebba) indicates. Asian British writer Daljit Nagra takes liberties with English for different reasons. Rather than having recourse to established Creole languages, and blending them with Standard English, his heteroglot poems frequently emulate ‘Punglish’, the English of migrants whose first language is Punjabi. Whilst it is the language prestige of London Jamaican that has been significantly enhanced since the 1990s, a fact not only confirmed by linguistic research but also by its transethnic uses both in the streets and on the page, Nagra’s substantial success and the mainstream attention he receives also indicate the clout of vernacular voices in poetry. They have the potential to connect with oral traditions and cultural memories, to record linguistic varieties, and to endow ‘street cred’ to authors and texts. In this chapter, these double-voiced poetic languages are also read as signs of resistance against residual monologic ideologies of Englishness. © Book proposal (02/2016): The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing p. 27 of 4

A Theory of Caribbean Aesthetics

I grew up in Guyana, South America, I lived there for a period of 10 years split between the relatives of my Guyanese parents in the capital, Georgetown and in Airy Hall, a village about 40 miles from the capital. The long residency at a formative time in my life, aged 2 to 12, left me with a feel for the region and as a writer gifted to me an aesthetics, an approach to writing that can be said to be tied to the region, that is, a Caribbean aesthetics. If this is the case, if the place shaped..

Divergences et convergences

A travers tout le monde postcolonial (et quelle que soit la définition que l'on donne à ce terme), une pluralité de cultures coexistent dans un même espace politique. Cette coexistence est plus ou moins harmonieuse. Elle se traduit fréquemment par des tensions, des incompatibilités, des conflits, mais elle est aussi source d'ouverture, d'enrichissement. En outre, il convient de la voir non pas comme une réalité statique et immuable mais comme un processus dynamique, voire dialectique, où s'expriment des tendances tant à la divergence qu'à la convergence. Les textes réunis dans le présent volume examinent ces tendances, ainsi que leurs effets, dans des contextes géopolitiques qui vont de l'Australie au Canada en passant par la Nouvelle-Zélande, la Caraïbe ou l'Afrique australe. Chaque contexte a ses spécificités, qui éclairent la problématique commune d'un jour particulier et permettent d'en saisir toutes les tonalités, d'autant plus que les analyses ici présentées concernent des questions littéraires aussi bien que sociales ou politiques. Ainsi se dévoile un panorama complexe et nuancé dont les perspectives permettent une meilleure appréhension du monde postcolonial contemporain. Throughout the postcolonial world (however defined), a plurality of cultures coexist within the same political spaces. This coexistence can be more or less harmonious. It often results in tensions, incompatibilities and conflicts, but it is also a source of enrichment which opens up new horizons. Besides, it should be seen not as a static, immutable reality but as a dynamic and perhaps dialectical process involving tendencies to both divergence and convergence. The texts gathered in this volume examine those tendencies, as well as their outcomes, within geopolitical contexts that range from Australia to Canada through New Zealand, the Caribbean or southern Africa. Each context is a specific one, shedding specific light on the common problematics and making it possible to grasp its every tonality, all the more since the analyses developed here deal with literary as well as social or political issues. Thus is unveiled a complex and nuanced panorama whose perspectives allow a better understanding of the contemporary postcolonial world