The Avant-Garde is in the Audience: On the Popular Avant-Gardism of Linton Kwesi Johnson's Dub Poetry

Abstract

AbstractThis 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.