Lumpen Poetics of the Blues

Abstract Where are the directors haunted by the sickness of the blues? This article responds to this question and positions the poetics of the lumpen, an underclass of people who bear the status of disabled, migrant, homeless, substance user, sex worker, and so on, as the ontological breech that could rupture our colonial ways of knowing/being/feeling. This rupture moves us beyond the neoliberal framework advocating that our ability to work is our defining principle for determining our rights and humanity. Taking Sylvia Wynter's passing phrase lumpen poetics of the blues, this article defines, builds, and deploys it as a theoretical framework to analyze Judah Attille's 1988 experimental short film Dreaming Rivers. The film, a product of Attille's work with the Black British queer and feminist collective Sankofa, depicts the dreams of Miss T, a Black migrant woman from Saint Lucia, upon her deathbed in England. The experimental form of Dreaming Rivers allows Attille to use cinema as an affective technology that transmits Miss T's blues to audiences rather than representing them as a distinct linear narrative. This experimentation is not dissimilar to the formal innovations found in the blues’ sonic or literary histories. And while much criticism has been devoted to those legacies, less has been said about what a blues poetics might look like cinematically beyond its narrative focus. The lumpen poetics of the blues is that attempt, and also navigates the difficulty this experimental film encounters by being doubly othered as not just culturally Black but produced by (or about) a class of people that are “degenerate” in society (the lumpen). By gazing from below, Dreaming Rivers is able to cinematically convey the pregnant ambitions of a dying migrant woman against a world that has denied her the right to a life.