From Jazz to Dub Poetry: Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Literary Problem Space of Black Music

In this article, I argue that Linton Kwesi Johnson played an important role in constructing and conceptualizing a Black radical literary tradition characterized by taking inspiration from Black music. By self-consciously modeling Black British dub poetry in the 1970s on African American jazz poetry and by comparing dub poetry, jazz poetry, and other Black music-inspired literary genres, he conceptualizes how literature in the Black radical tradition explores Black music as a literary problem space. His work brings attention to the ways in which authors in the Black radical tradition have used Black music as starting point to ask a series of fundamental critical questions about the purpose and capacity of literature and "literarity." These acts of questioning have often been ahead of mainstream literary theory in thinking beyond New Criticism and other formalist paradigms. I further argue more generally that British Black music criticism in the 1970s and 80s, as exemplified by the now out-of-print magazine Black Music and Jazz Review where Johnson was a contributor, produced discourses on Black aesthetics that could add valuable perspectives to Black Studies and African Diaspora Studies today.