Natural mysticism: reggae and Caribbean poetics
Thu 23 Apr 2015, 19:00 - 20:15
- Venue
- The British Academy, 10-11 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AH
With its complex engagement with issues of faith, politics, identity discourses, social consciousness, sexual politics, fashion, everyday cultural practices, geopolitical dynamics, language innovation and invention, and its enduring persistence in the popular and literary consciousness of Caribbean society, reggae music continues to be one of the singular, most consistently illuminating and necessary perspectives through which to understand the poetics of Caribbean writing today. In this lecture, Professor Dawes rehearses the aesthetic principles of reggae music and reveals the ways in which the music, in its many incarnations, continues to shape the work of several generations of Caribbean poets.
Speaker:
Professor Kwame Dawes
Chancellor's Professor of English and Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner, University of Nebraska
About the speaker:
Kwame Dawes is author of 18 collections of poetry, two novels, numerous anthologies, and plays. He has won the Forward Poetry Prize, Pushcart Prizes, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Emmy. At the University of Nebraska he is a Chancellor's Professor of English and Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner.
Chaired by Professor Nigel Leask FBA, University of Glasgow