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Linton Kwesi Johnson is underappreciated as a theorist of black aesthetics. Johnson’s work, seen within the wider Black British cultural archive of the 1970s, offers opportunities for rethinking afro-diasporic and transnational black aesthetics. Reggae music and dub poetry were closely related to other forms of black music and poetry in the UK in the 1970s, and inspired important conversations about blackness, radical politics and aesthetics. In this presentation, drawn from her working paper, "From Jazz to Dub Poetry: LKJ, Langston Hughes and the Literary Problem Space of Black Music", Dr Layne asks: what is the contemporary relevance of looking closer at this period in Black British culture? How might revisiting this period improve our understanding of reggae’s role in a broader theoretical and diasporic conversation about the relationship between blackness, aesthetics and poetry?
