From the Black Panthers to the Caribbean Artists Movement: dub poetry and the aesthetics of the black radical tradition

Johnson emigrated to London from Jamaica in 1963, whereupon he enrolled in Tulse Hill secondary school in the South London Borough of Lambeth. While there, he endured what critic Vivien Goldman, in a profile in Sounds magazine, dubbed an ‘archetypal immigrant childhood’, an experience of estrangement Johnson himself portrayed as follows: ‘I used to think literally the streets of London were paved with gold … so I was in for a rude awakening when we arrived and I saw all these grey buildings with smoke coming out of chimneys and so on.’Footnote ²⁶ ‘Tulse Hill’, meanwhile, ‘was initially a very traumatic experience because that was my first confrontation with racism’ outside the Caribbean.Footnote ²⁷ ‘I was naturally put into a very low stream [of students] because they assumed that if you came from the Colonies you aren't up to it … I was really, really surprised at the amount of prejudice from the staff’ (italics in original, et passim).Footnote ²⁸ Britain's colonial past was obdurate. If by the 1980s, liberal multiculturalism would be its byproduct, then in the 1960s official discourse on race remained baldly discriminatory, premised in an ‘enemy within’ notion of national(istic) cohesion.Footnote ²⁹ As Johnson puts it in his semi-autobiographical text, ‘Writing Reggae’:

Such a context ‘makes it very easy [for young blacks] to be politicised’, Goldman noted.Footnote ³¹ By his late teens, Johnson became politicized indeed.

‘I became involved in the Black Panther Movement [in 1970]’, he recalls, joining the organization's youth wing following a rousing presentation delivered at Tulse Hill by Panther figurehead, Althea Jones.Footnote ³² The link-up proved formative. At the Panthers, Johnson was encouraged to study the black literary canon, notably authors such as James, Frantz Fanon, and W. E. B. Du Bois, and to try his own hand at writing. On both of these fronts, Du Bois was a particular interest. ‘He talked about “The Colour Line”’, Johnson reflects. ‘The problem of the 20th century was the problem of the colour line. And after I read [him] I just wanted to read more and to write more and to express my own ideas and my own feelings and my experiences about growing up in England.’Footnote ³³ Following yet additional studies at New Beacon Books – Johnson cites reading Aimé Césaire at John La Rose and Sarah White's now-legendary store as a pivotal influence – the poet co-founded a Panther-associated group called the Black Literary Society, in which to workshop poems vis-à-vis Du Bois's theories. The Society quickly dissolved; but it remains important historically – indeed, momentous. In conjunction, Johnson and fellow Panthers established arguably London's first Rasta drumming ensemble: Rasta Love.Footnote ³⁴

It is here that one observes a clear link with Moten's ‘aesthetics of the black radical tradition’, and with the BAM specifically. As Johnson remembers, ‘in the Panthers I heard the Last Poets’, BAM-affiliates.Footnote ³⁵ ‘We used to have the albums of the Last Poets which circulated amongst the membership and I was attracted to what they were doing, using the voice and percussion. I started to do that … The drummers [I performed with] were called Rasta Love.’Footnote ³⁶ Unfortunately, like the Society's poems, Rasta Love's corpus has largely eluded historical documentation.Footnote ³⁷ But there is one notable exception: a hybrid work of theatre, poetry, and music titled Voices of the Living and the Dead – a piece that brings Johnson's early aesthetics sharply into relief.

Written by Johnson and premiered by Rasta Love in 1973, the piece is nominally a play, featuring four ‘characters’, including personifications of the Dead, an Echo, and the Living, plus a narrator. Musically, it calls for drums, bass guitar, and flute.Footnote ³⁸ Resembling Césaire in its fragmented verse and Fanon in ‘its emphasis on violent insurrection’,Footnote ³⁹ the work lacks an obvious narrative; instead, it unfolds through a call-and-response structure, as Dead makes a statement, Echo ‘echoes’ it, and the Living draws comparisons between recent political events (among the ‘living’) and those of the past (the ‘dead’). Convening what critic Robert Stewart calls a ‘libation for the ancestors of black history and struggle’ generally, Voices at the same time alludes to black British locality specifically.Footnote ⁴⁰ Have a read. While attending to the piece's dual temporality, consider also the way Johnson evokes the experiences glossed in ‘Writing Reggae’. Not for nothing did one critic think Voices ‘sensed accurately the events which tore at the guts of British society in the summer of 1981’ – the 1958–9 riots’ second showing.Footnote ⁴¹ If, in Johnson's words, the ‘wounds’ of history had turned into ‘scars’, then his not-so-subtle invocation of MP Enoch Powell's infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech of 1968 suggests a new wound and catalyst for impending insurrection.Footnote ⁴²

[…]

How might one conceptualize Voices’s aesthetic demeanour? A textual excerpt can hardly do justice to the piece, which demands performance. But there is more at interpretive stake than simply losing out on the work's ‘presence’.Footnote ⁴⁴ To this end, Voices’s intermedial status is instructive. While technically a piece of theatre, in 1974 Voices was published as Johnson's ‘first book of poems’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Accordingly, whether to witness the work live, to read it privately, or to hear it recited would seem perfectly valid modes of aisthesis.Footnote ⁴⁶ Yet there is still more to take into account. Because to read the text would also mean to view a set of drawings by artist Errol Lloyd, which the book's publisher intercalated throughout, suggesting an importantly graphic expressive dimension to the work. Throughout his career, Johnson would consistently integrate visual elements of this sort in his publications (to say nothing of album art or images in liner notes); alongside Voices, the 1981 collection, Inglan is a Bitch, likewise contains several illustrations, serving as a prime example of this convergence of media.Footnote ⁴⁷ That Johnson dovetailed media in this manner should scarcely come as a surprise, though, given his debt to Du Bois, Fanon, Césaire, the Last Poets, and so on. After all, as Moten insists, ‘black performance’, historically, ‘has always been the ongoing improvisation of a kind of lyricism of the surplus’.Footnote ⁴⁸ In Voices, such surplus entails medial undecidability. In Moten's terms, Johnson enjoins an ‘appositional encounter’, a ‘visual-spatial-tactile improvisation of [a] system’ of formats and generic contracts enacted in the ritual of performative and interpretive acts. Granted, it would be reductive to limit experimentation of this kind to African-diasporic cultures; ‘intermedia’ has remained a constant in the post-conceptual arts at large.Footnote ⁴⁹ And yet, as Brent Hayes Edwards has recently argued, the history of black aesthetic technologies affords an exceptionally illuminating site for unpacking this drive. Variously textual, graphic, sonic, and phonic, Voices situates itself squarely in this history, exploiting the electricity produced by the friction of cross-cutting media, ‘testing and stretching and redefining the frontiers of articulacy’.Footnote ⁵⁰ As in James's revision of Marxism, this anti-hierarchical, ‘radical nonexclusion’ of elements offers a field of possibility: a modality of interstice and excess wherein ‘(re)visions of Enlightenment formulations of universality and freedom’ have – again, historically – been empowered.Footnote ⁵¹

At any rate, if Voices reflects Johnson's reimagining of extant black radicalisms discovered at the Panthers and New Beacon, other involvements at this time manifest the poet's keen interest in interfacing this political-aesthetic with likewise extant avant-garde formations. Johnson's participation in the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), mentioned earlier, proved key to this interest. Active between 1966 and 1972, the CAM represented a Britain-based analogue to concomitant black arts initiatives across the globe, such as the BAM, yes, but also numerous other post-war movements in the wake of the 1920s New Negro Movement, Afrocubanismo in Cuba, Haiti's indigénist movement, and more.Footnote ⁵² By contrast with these groups, however, the CAM signalled the first institutionalized effort to concentrate on the whole of the Anglophone Caribbean and its diaspora, thus departing from a ‘black aesthetic’ per se (as in Baraka) in favour of a stress on creolization and what co-founder Kamau Brathwaite called ‘intercultural’ exchange.Footnote ⁵³ Johnson caught only the tail-end of the CAM; ‘I am what the cooling embers of the movement spawned.’Footnote ⁵⁴ Still, the Movement's impact on Johnson is difficult to overstate, and in particular that of Brathwaite, whose presence gave the young poet a crucial push for thinking critically about music-text relations: a fundament, that is, of what would become Johnson's hallmark, dub poetry.Footnote ⁵⁵ Indexing what Moten would call ‘musicked speech’, Johnson remembers:

Let us dwell on this statement momentarily. In it, Johnson flags two interrelated facets of Brathwaite's thought, which not only preoccupied debates within the CAM, but also pervaded Johnson's output from the 1970s onward: a concern for ‘musicked speech’, and its apparent corollary, ‘nation language’.Footnote ⁵⁷ This latter term is especially problematic. As summarized in his celebrated History of the Voice, Brathwaite theorized the idea to refer to the submerged, allegedly transhistorical voice of the Afro-Caribbean people as registered in oral cultural traditions.Footnote ⁵⁸ Such linguistic variations as patois or pidgin emerge not as derivations of English, or as ‘dialects’, Brathwaite argues, but as quasi-languages all their own. Nation language bespeaks the historical roots of oral culture as a history of routes, ‘the submerged area of dialect which is much more closely allied to the African aspect of experience in the Caribbean. It may be in English: but often it is in an English which is like a howl, or a shout or a machine-gun or the wind or a wave.’Footnote ⁵⁹ Hence this concept's basis in ‘surplus’, a ‘horizon of articulacy’ – indeed, in music. For Brathwaite, nation languages both stem from and mimic Afro-Caribbean musics such as kaiso, calypso, and reggae; rife with whispers, assonance, and stuttering, they likewise stress performance. To wit, Brathwaite sees vernacular speech and vernacular music as two sides of the same coin, both of which are part of a ‘total expression’ that evades standard English, not least because colonial education structures absented nation languages altogether. This last point is paramount. If, according to Peter Hitchcock, History of the Voice reflects ‘an archaeology of voice, a history intoned more than inscribed’, then it likewise suggests a supplement to hegemonic literary models.Footnote ⁶⁰ ‘The hurricane does not roar in pentameters’, as Louise Bennett, Claude McKay, Mighty Sparrow, and indeed dub poets such as Johnson – all of whom are analysed in History of the Voice – knew well.Footnote ⁶¹

In short, the simultaneously everyday idiom and literary technique Brathwaite named nation language aimed to furnish a decolonial consciousness: in Brathwaite's words, a ‘syllabic intelligence’ premised in aurality.Footnote ⁶² Pace Hitchcock, though, Brathwaite routinely inscribed this consciousness into text, as the poet's well-known Rights of Passage collection makes plain. Brathwaite employs short, alliterative, and onomatopoetic lines in the tome, as if to transcribe performances or recitations. In the poem ‘Wings of a Dove’, for instance, he replicates the trochee sound-structures of Rasta drumming, while in the process weaving a dense fabric of ‘intercultural’ musical allusions. ‘Titled after a traditional Pukkumina ritual song in Carlos Malcolm's ska recording, “Wings of a Dove”’, the text of the poem in turn references the ‘Dry Bones’ spiritual popularized by African-American composer and polymath James Weldon Johnson.Footnote ⁶³ ‘Watch dem ship dem / come to town dem … / prasin’ the glory of the lord.’Footnote ⁶⁴ Music is made both content and form.

In any event, and to reiterate, I belabour the matter of nation language because it formed a germinal point of departure for Johnson's poetry from his involvement in the CAM onward (and after Voices, which exempted nation language).Footnote ⁶⁵ Johnson did not adopt Brathwaite's theory wholesale, however. Deviating from Brathwaite's interest in Afro-Caribbeanness generally, Johnson often used nation language as a means of rendering the localized diasporic experience of the British nation specifically – as he would later put it, ‘Dread Inna Inglan’ (see section ‘Dub poems as “avant-gardiste works of art”’).

A case in point of this emphasis on locality would be the 1973 ‘Five Nights of Bleeding’, Johnson's first published poem, and early attempt at putting his own spin on Brathwaitean and similar principles. Dedicated to Leroy Harris, a teenager who was stabbed at a South London party, the song chronicles ‘five nights’ of violence at London clubs. Adopting patois as its mode of address, the piece invokes a transnational quality while at the same time speaking the language of the poet's local fanbase.Footnote ⁶⁶ And it does so in multiply sonic, ‘excessive’ ways. First, the piece recruits reggae rhythms as a syntactic basis; as critic Mervyn Morris observed in 1983, ‘we can distinctly hear reggae rhythms in or under [its] verse’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Simultaneously, the piece is about the soundscape of 1970s London, referencing music venues such as Shepherd's youth club in Brixton, the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park, and Soprano B sound system. Lastly – and most innovatively – Johnson potentiates the poem to contribute to the very music scene it describes. Published in 1973, ‘Five Nights’ was also recorded on the 1978 LP Dread Beat and Blood, a hit record that would have been spun regularly at Shepherd's (where Johnson also worked; see below), versioned at the Rainbow, dubbed-over by Soprano B, and so on. As you read the following excerpt, part of which is Brathwaite's transcription of Johnson's performance, I suggest that you also listen to the 1978 recording in order to get an impression of the poem's musical traits.

Did you hear it? BRIX/TON. Sys/tem. Mad/ness… war. Like reggae guitar strokes, iambic upbeats suffuse the poem's structure, cross-cutting media. Via the inscription and recitation of patois-based verse, Johnson transforms reggae music into reggae poetry formally, while evoking the music played at Shepherd's, the Rainbow, and Soprano B in terms of content. To be sure, Brathwaite had already amply investigated this nexus of form and content. That Johnson updated Brathwaite's techniques by recording ‘Five Nights’ on the popular medium of the LP, though, commands pause. A collection of pop songs, Dread Beat and Blood was a far cry from the ‘self-conscious’, ‘certifiably “out there” sounds of Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman’.Footnote ⁷⁰ This is music you can sing along and dance to. Accessible musically, it could likewise be readily consumed, available for purchase at local record stores, and for a listen at sound systems.Footnote ⁷¹ No attendance at a CAM meeting required. You need not even attend a performance. You do not even have to read this dub poem! Johnson in a sense commodified the avant-garde, making CAM-inspired techniques ‘popular’ by at once documenting and relating the excesses of nation language to the concrete circumstances of black Britain as noted in ‘Writing Reggae’.Footnote ⁷² The avant-garde is in the audience, as an LP. The audience makes their own ‘appositional encounters’ in the act of listening. In part, such is Johnson's popular avant-gardism in action.

Johnson's popular avant-gardism and the ‘booshwah’ institution: the Railton Road Community Centre

But how do we know Johnson's recordings were actually in the audience? And how did Johnson sublate his position as artist in relation to that audience in the manner described by Moten in the introduction? To both queries, I would respond that we might productively glean the nature of Johnson's blossoming popular avant-gardism by turning back to Sounds – that is, a leading popular music journal of the day.

Or more precisely, consider the following statement by Sounds’s Eric Fuller regarding a 1979 biopic about the artist produced just after the release of Dread Beat and Blood. Directed by Franco Rosso (best-known for the 1980 Babylon), the film shared much of its impetus with the preoccupations of the present article, seeking to detail the community-inclined slant of Johnson's oeuvre. Widely hailed as a significant achievement, what excited critics most about the piece, also titled Dread Beat and Blood (more appositions!), were the first-hand glimpses it offered of the poet at work in the community spaces and action campaigns I describe more extensively momentarily. Wrote Fuller:

That Johnson attracted the interest of such an eminent filmmaker as Rosso speaks volumes about the poet's emerging popularity. The biopic itself added to this. Although ‘I had already developed a cult following performing my poetry with the Rasta drummers’, Johnson recollects, ‘the film, I think, did a lot in making me known to the wider public.’Footnote ⁷⁴ But likewise, Rosso's production testifies that Johnson was also himself part of the demographic to whom much of his intermedial praxis was targeted. As Brixtonite Akua Rugg remarked:

For my purposes, it merits pausing to get a clearer sense of how Johnson put the ethos underlying Rugg's and Fuller's commentaries into practice. For their observations not only begin to evince what later I characterize as the poet's Jamesian cultural politics. Moreover, Johnson's work at the Railton Road Community Centre, specifically, enables us to re-evaluate a key tenet of most avant-garde theories from a decidedly popular avant-gardist perspective; namely, the joint matter of the ‘bourgeois institution’ and ‘anti-bourgeois’ art.

As such influential theorists as Peter Bürger, Marjorie Perloff, and Andreas Huyssen have observed, the ‘historical avant-gardes’ of Dada, Surrealism, Futurism, and Russian Constructivism wished routinely to develop an ‘anti-art’ sensibility: to deploy the products of their labour as a means of critiquing the very conditions of production and exhibition on which the art-world relied; through these ‘institutional critiques’, the remnants of nineteenth-century aestheticism including the principle of autonomy and disinterested judgement might fade, in favour of jettisoning institutions altogether in order to merge aesthetics with everyday life.Footnote ⁷⁶ Famously, Bürger deemed these ambitions to have failed; by the time the initial shock of ‘the’ avant-garde waned, he holds, the art-world had absorbed and thus annulled all avant-gardes’ critiques of it, be they a urinal with ‘R. Mutt’ written on it (to demystify institutions’ ability to accord ready-mades with value), a manifesto (which endeavoured to interpellate an audience on behalf of a cause), or a ‘neo-avant-gardist’ multiple of the sort associated later with Warhol, Fluxus, and others.Footnote ⁷⁷ As popular avant-gardist, Johnson did not fulminate against institutions such as the gallery or museum. Nor did he pose institutional critique or the convergence of art and life – the twin evergreens of many avant-garde studies – as expressed problematics.Footnote ⁷⁸ But he did inhabit other kinds of institutions, both ambivalently and strategically. Notably, he exploited his budding celebrity as flagged by Rugg in market institutions in order to facilitate activist efforts at the grassroots institutions invoked by Fuller.

Johnson's position at the Railton Road Community Centre, also known as Shepherd's – the same Shepherd's from ‘Five Nights’ – throws this twofold institutional status into relief. Founded in 1964 by the Methodist Church, Shepherd's was a 100 per cent black youth club, and hosted events ranging from dances to sport leagues to sound systems (Soprano B periodically played there).Footnote ⁷⁹ Johnson worked at the Centre, and dwelt frequently on his involvements there in press interviews; above all, he spoke of the Railton Youth Club Action Committee (RYCAC), a subgroup the poet helped form amid a shake-up in the Centre leadership in 1979. According to an October 1979 issue of Action Line, the Committee's newsletter, the Centre underwent the change involuntarily, when the Methodist Association of Youth Clubs and affiliate parties not only closed Shepherd's without notice, but also suspended a youth worker named Ivan Madray: ‘Righteously angered by this high-handed action, Railton youth club members responded immediately. Together with workers, [they] seized the club premises and staged a sit-in which lasted three long months.’Footnote ⁸⁰ In addition to re-opening the club, sit-in participants issued three demands: to reinstate Madray; to ensure that other workers could stay at Railton; and to grant Centre membership bargaining power. In part to pressure the Methodist Association, Johnson – again, strategically – exploited his growing celebrity in order to stage a rally, which drew nearly five hundred attendees, and made for a star-studded show to boot: ‘The rally was supported by black artists like Rico, Merger, Accabre Huntley, the Four Wise Men, The Railton Disco Queens and Linton Johnson’, Action Line recounts (Figure 1).Footnote ⁸¹ Subsequently, and crucially, the poet utilized his access to the press in the hopes of garnering support for RYCAC struggles more publicly. Glossing the release of his 1980 record Bass Culture, Johnson put the matter succinctly: ‘People could say I'm using the youth club to publicise my record … when in fact I'm using my record to publicise the youth club.’Footnote ⁸²

Figure 1.

(Colour online) Flyer for a rally in support of the Railton Youth Club Action Committee. Accessed at GPI, the Railton Community Centre collection, GB 2904 BPM/7/1/11/3. Reproduced with permission from the George Padmore Institute.

Johnson made this statement in Sounds. This should be double-underlined. For Johnson's popular avant-gardism – the transposition of experiments at the CAM and with Rasta Love into the commercial mainstream and the grassroots domains – did not radically oppose the cultural industries. Rather, and to put a point on it, the poet engaged these structures tactically, precisely to elicit support for causes of the variety pursued by the RYCAC. Such an orientation towards popular culture digressed from the anti-bourgeois ‘anti-art’ of the historical avant-gardes, whose manifestos, for instance, certainly attempted but nonetheless struggled to reach a wide audience; similarly, events such as the RYCAC rally differed substantially from the attention-grabbing exhibitions of the Dadaists, say, which as David Hopkins reminds us attracted only small patches of bourgeois elites (hence the ‘failure’ of Dada's anti-bourgeois purview).Footnote ⁸³ This is not to say that Johnson wholly evaded a ‘theory-death’ of this kind, however.Footnote ⁸⁴ In fact, at Shepherd's, the poet persistently found himself butting against a ‘bourgeoisie’ of a different sort: in his words, London's ‘black petty booshwah’.

In Action Line, Johnson co-wrote:

Madray no longer identified with the very campaign that led to his reinstatement, it seems, having indeed antagonized the RYCAC in several ways. As Johnson alleges, Madray attempted to thwart the poet from representing the RYCAC on the London Fyle radio programme; barred management sympathetic to the RYCAC from attending organizational meetings; and even trafficked in ‘high-handed’ actions of his own, firing three members of Railton's administrative team without notice.Footnote ⁸⁶ Yet the most disheartening action entailed a measure ‘to officially exclude members over 21 years of age from the activities of the club’, thus reversing a tradition of maintaining ‘links between different generations of young blacks with differing sets of experiences’.Footnote ⁸⁷ For Johnson, this ‘autocratic’ act symbolized a burgeoning trend towards careerism within the black community at large, somewhat in the vein Lester Spence has diagnosed.Footnote ⁸⁸ Accordingly, Action Line declared, ‘Enough is Enough, the Madrays Must Go!’: ‘We will not allow people who live outside of our experience dictate to us … it is up to members to fight to preserve our rights and protect what is ours’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Amplifying this sentiment, Johnson released the song ‘Di Black Petty Booshwah’, on Bass Culture, in an effort to clarify how Madray ‘lived outside’ the experiences of RYCAC members. As he told ZigZag – like Sounds, another major music journal – ‘I was basically talking about Ivan Madray.’ The song ‘is talking about a section of the black community who make a living out of the colonial situation that blacks find themselves in here in Britain. They don't believe in radical change, revolutionary change … They hustle a living off the State … They get all these big urban aid grants and all this Inner City partnership money’, selling their agendas with ‘black power rhetoric’ without trying genuinely to fulfil its tenets.Footnote ⁹⁰ Set to ska rhythms, the following text captures this view concisely: ‘tru dem seh dem edicate dem a gwaan irate / tru dem seh dem edicate dem a seek tap rate / dem a seek posishan / aaf di backs af blacks / seek promoshan / aaf di backs af blacks / dem a black petty-booshwah / dem full a flaw.Footnote ⁹¹

To be sure, I do not wish to suggest that Johnson's work in the RYCAC or elsewhere somehow voids the value of classic theories of the avant-garde. Nor do I want to imply that the historical avant-gardes’ anti-elitist or even ‘popular’ ambitions were vacuous, gobbled by the very institutions they purported to counteract, as Bürger does. Instead, part of what I hope to highlight is how Johnson's activities permit those of us invested in avant-garde studies to broach the topic of institutionality more charitably. As popular institutions rooted in the marketplace, Sounds and ZigZag enabled the propagation for an ‘anti-bourgeois’ campaign at the grassroots level, which itself unfolded within a community institution that dealt with agonisms of its own. Institutions served not as foils, but as vehicles through which a popular avant-gardism was achieved, if ambivalently. This would not be so remarkable were it not for a certain preponderance in avant-garde studies to understand avant-gardism categorically as anti-institutional.Footnote ⁹² Johnson's avant-gardism was in the audience, by way of institutions – as was the CAM's before him (not to mention the BAM's). I elaborate on the grassroots character of such activities shortly, ultimately returning to James to do so. But as a means of getting there, I now explore ways Johnson's work also resonated with classic theories of avant-gardist practice (recall Sell's ‘inside/outside’ designation). Following Bürger, I show how dub poems can be interpreted as ‘avant-gardiste works of art’.

Dub poems as ‘avant-gardiste works of art’

The Jamesian politics of Race Today: from the 1978 Carnival to the Black Creation initiative

In its published version, Johnson gave ‘Man Free’ the subtitle, ‘reggae poem’, an appellation that might initially raise an eyebrow – recalling the ‘bacchanal’ sound-world of ‘It Dread Inna Inglan’, the piece is in fact based in calypso. The song's groove ‘is informed by Calypso beats and rhythms’, Johnson has said, while ‘between the lines “Darcus Outta Jail” and “Race Today Cannot Fail” is the beat of a steel band’.Footnote ¹³⁰ But beyond the fact that reggae and calypso styles have enjoyed a history of mutual exchange, Johnson's decision to draw such a propinquity between these musics in a poem about Howe particularly would only make sense. After all, and as Abner Cohen reminds us, Howe ‘had been steeped in the steelband movement since his early childhood in Trinidad, where he was a member of a well-known band called Renegades, of East Dry River, Port of Spain’. Writes Cohen: ‘Steelband music was in his blood.’Footnote ¹³¹

Johnson's sophomore album, Forces of Victory, effectively prolongs the calypso association, as the LP's title track makes plain. The song is about a mas band called the Race Today Renegades, so named for the Port of Spain Renegades, which Race Today organized for the 1978 Notting Hill Carnival. As Ashley Dawson has neatly summarized, each year at Carnival, mas bands develop a band ‘theme’, according to which costumes are made, music performed, and even short plays written.Footnote ¹³² In 1978, the Renegades chose ‘Forces of Victory’ as their theme, a selection that proved serendipitous indeed. That year, the group won the ‘Band of the Year’ prize from the Carnival Development Committee, the same group Johnson nodded to in ‘Man Free’ (and for which Howe was by this time serving as the first democratically elected chair). The ‘victory’ theme was less about competing for the award, however, than the band's performances. As Howe explains, the Renegades sought to recreate ‘the spectacle of a modern army, victorious in battle’.Footnote ¹³³ Emulating decolonial guerrilla movements of decades past, the Renegades elaborated a vanguardist aesthetics – notwithstanding Race Today's opposition to vanguardist politics, as I discuss shortly – which Johnson evoked in ‘Forces of Victory’ by declaiming ‘wi dressed in red / an wi feelin dread / we dressed in green / an wi feelin mean’, among other descriptors.Footnote ¹³⁴

That Johnson and the Renegades aestheticized decolonial struggle is obvious. Yet the combined work of the Renegades, Johnson, and Howe enacted ‘victory’ on much broader symbolic and cultural registers, as well. The very existence of the 1978 Carnival brings this to a head. As Dawson reminds us, since Carnival's beginnings in Britain in the early 1960s, the event was plagued by an ‘igniting conflict between the black community and the state’, due to recurrent threats levelled by government officials and police to uproot the annual affair from the Notting Hill streets.Footnote ¹³⁵ The occasional pick-pocket and street fight were too much for the Met to handle, apparently, spurring ‘heavy manners’ in 1976 and 1977, and open hostility in the processions’ interim. Charged with policing the 1976 Carnival, the Met's Police Commander Patterson, for instance, ‘openly identified with and promoted the aims of a petition being organized by a small section of the local white community to have the Notting Hill Carnival relocated to White City Stadium or Battersea Park’.Footnote ¹³⁶ By 1978, then, Carnival had consolidated itself as a hotly contested facet of Britain's public sphere; as a Race Today pamphlet put it, ‘Carnival has now established itself as the most important, annual mass event, in the life of black Britain … It has inevitably become not only a cultural festival, but an arena for the demonstration of the political forces that take this cultural opportunity to gather and make themselves felt.’Footnote ¹³⁷ So, again, Carnival's survival through the 1970s marks its very existence as a counter-hegemonic ‘victory’ for London's Caribbean communities. Forces of Victory – as album, song, and mas theme – both counter-memorially contributed to and was a part of this demographic. As if to amplify this community-aligned cultural politics, Race Today recruited its readership to participate in the 1978 processions as ‘Renegades’, via several articles Howe published about Carnival aesthetics and history (Figure 2).Footnote ¹³⁸

Figure 2.

(Colour online) 1978 Notting Hill Carnival information, published in the July/August issue of Race Today. The image features the many costumes and ‘characters’ that possible participants can play. © Una Howe, reproduced with permission.

While perhaps the most spectacular example of Race Today's cultural-political tilt, the Renegades were not, however, an isolated instance of it. Indeed, since its founding, Race Today specialized not just in action campaigns, but also more subdued cultural initiatives as cornerstones in achieving Howe's joint goal of documenting and facilitating ‘emerging struggles’. Accordingly, under the direction of the aforementioned Rugg, Race Today’s erstwhile literary critic, the periodical added sections such as ‘Poet's Corner’ and ‘Creation for Liberation’, regular columns covering topics in music, film, theatre, and literature.Footnote ¹³⁹ Outside the journal, meanwhile, the Collective assisted with London's annual Open Exhibitions, which showcased the work of black visual artists.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ What's more, Howe, Johnson, Dhondy, and so on co-sponsored the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books, a likewise annual event which staged musical performances, readings, lectures, screenings, and more (Figure 3).Footnote ¹⁴¹ Such a culturalist focus was nothing new, of course; as we've seen, the Panthers similarly prized grassroots cultural production and education. But what distinguished Race Today's efforts were their intensity, prodigiousness, and – by contrast with some Black Power groups – their prioritizing of art's position in the everyday rather than revolutionary politics or rhetoric. Race Today committed itself to what Bunce and Field deem Howe's ‘essential insight’: ‘that political movements and cultural movements emerge hand in hand’.Footnote ¹⁴²

Figure 3.

(Colour online) Flyer for The International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books, 1985. Johnson (pictured) is a featured performer at this year's set of events. Accessed at GPI, The International Bookfairs collection, GB 2904 BFC/04/02/03/02. Reproduced with permission from the George Padmore Institute.

In his dub poetry, Johnson aimed analogously to bring this dual emergence into fruition. In the Fanonist undertones of Voices, the local preoccupations of ‘Five Nights’, the exasperation conveyed by ‘Di Black Petty Booshwah’, and in the counter-memorial pieces on It Dread Inna Inglan, a cultural politics of this kind can be readily inferred. Yet it is in the poet's work as co-editor of and contributor to Race Today that his investment in community-based cultural engagement comes across most vividly. And so too is what I see to be Johnson's signal revision of avant-garde theory, as broached earlier through Moten, Sell, and Smethurst: his foregrounding of community arts engagement as part and parcel of an avant-gardist programme. Such a revision complemented the poet's comparable reimagining of the matter of the institution underscored previously with respect to Shepherd's. To investigate further, let us take a look at an arts initiative Johnson apparently co-facilitated, called Black Creation, a predecessor of Creation for Liberation.

‘Creation for Liberation tried to follow in the footsteps of CAM’, Johnson has said. ‘But we hadn't been able to really come up to anything like that. I mean, after all, CAM had within it some very powerful and seminal figures.’Footnote ¹⁴³ Neither Creation for Liberation nor Black Creation truly wanted powerful figures, though. Instead, they strove to generate community- and even amateur-friendly involvement – like the Renegades, in a populist vein. Black Creation's mission statement, which Johnson seems to have co-written, throws this inclusive ethos into relief. ‘In the last few years’, it states, ‘black culture has become a political issue in Britain. Our festivals are surrounded by police, the books which reflect fractions of our lives are attacked, the music we make is subject to the coercion and pressure of media, market[s] and the interests which control both.’ Race Today's Marxist slant peppers this statement just as much as its aversion to multiculturalism. ‘At another level, Britain attempts to encapsulate this culture, parcel it in a pill to be swallowed by legislated generations of “multi-culturals.” In that thicket of opposition, the struggle for “culture” is a struggle for authenticity.’ This last point is crucial as far as avant-garde theory is concerned. Because ‘[ours] is not the kind of authenticity sought by the avant-garde of Europe’, the authors write, ‘who lived as artists and created for a future they could have no hand in bringing about.’ Against such futuristic ambitions, Black Creation features such as ‘the short stories of [Brixtonite] Jennifer Johnson present the kind of authenticity that sustains the lives of young blacks in Britain. With only that amount of self-consciousness required to speak into a microphone or put pen to paper, [contributors] represent an artistic movement which grows out of the day to day life of a community that retains and rejoices in its distinctness.’ Importantly, ‘success gets a second place’ in this milieu:

How might we conceptualize Black Creation's avant-gardism? At first, the question might seem perverse: Black Creation expressly disavowed ‘the avant-garde of Europe’, and it differed from the CAM, whose ‘powerful and seminal figures’ implied an elite structure – a vanguard. And yet, the vision sketched by Black Creation betrays classic avant-gardist traits, much like the BAM, which as Sell notes similarly opposed itself to Eurocentric models. The BAM was never wholly ‘of the avant-garde’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ And neither was Black Creation. But insofar as we can detach the critical category of avant-gardism from the socio-historical category of the avant-garde, and insofar as we can appreciate avant-gardism as a ‘plural’ concept encompassing manifold radical practices, then the cultural vision animating Black Creation is suggestive.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Black Creation exceeds the example Johnson had already set in performative, ‘appositional’ works such as Voices or ‘Five Nights’. And it goes beyond the paradigm of the ‘avant-gardiste work of art’ displayed by pieces such as ‘It Dread Inna Inglan’ or ‘Man Free’. It even differs from the RYCAC, which after all was not an arts-based undertaking. To turn a phrase from Ana Alonso-Minutti, the initiative indexes what we might call a ‘community-oriented avant-garde’: focused on arts and culture while premising itself in ‘roots and responsibility’.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

To get a more concrete sense of this community-oriented avant-gardism, consider the following contributions to Black Creation, each of which appeared in the forum's first set of publications.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ On the literary front, Jennifer Johnson offers two short stories, called ‘Ballad For You’ and ‘Park Bench Blues’; like Linton Johnson's poems, both are composed in an orthographic patois. Rugg for her part gives a searing review of the film Black Joy starring Norman Beaton, Paul Newman, and Barbara Streisand, asserting that the film's ‘prurient interest’ in ‘sex, drugs, and violence’ supplies a false image and indeed ‘encapsulates the culture’ of daily life in Brixton as an expurgated commodity. Meanwhile, Michael and Keith La Rose review a 45 that Johnson released under the name Poet and the Roots (his moniker for a time in the late 1970s), while Johnson himself reviews Max Romeo's Reconstruction and Third World's 96 Degrees in the Shade. Finally, Lorine Burt and Claudius Hilliman profile Peoples War, a sound system which took its name to indicate the specificity of ‘Britain where black youth are fighting the state’: an analogue, the interviewee suggests, to ‘peoples wars’ in Angola, Mozambique, and the West Indies. This last example makes Black Creation's links with the Renegades obvious, and not just in the terms of a decolonial aesthetics.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ As Alonso-Minutti might put it, Black Creation, ‘while locally rooted’, offered an alternative space ‘for the configuration of a community of performers that contests issues of race [and class]’. The result is a ‘community-oriented experimental platform’ reaching ‘levels of inclusion and group solidarity rarely seen in experimental scenes’.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

In avant-garde scenes as well. Indeed, and as I will contend in the final part of this article, Black Creation's grassroots and community platform offers a real chance for theorists of the avant-garde to position their subject of study anew. To dissect further, I want to return to the issues I began to sketch in the introduction, and specifically the (anti-)philosophy of James, as presented by Moten.

Why spotlight James? Well, not only did Race Today count James as a member, but also the group's politics and theory were directly shaped by Jamesian strategy. As Bunce and Field observe, ‘James's relationship with Race Today dated back to the earliest days of Howe's involvement with the magazine.’Footnote ¹⁵¹ Howe was James's nephew, in fact, and in 1981 James relocated to London from the USA in part to reinforce this family tie, moving in to a flat situated above Race Today's offices. While there, Race Today granted the 80-year-old a regular column (called ‘Cricket Notes’), and routinely published his writing and lectures.Footnote ¹⁵² That Race Today later was absorbed into the C. L. R. James Institute alone speaks volumes, as James's philosophy figured centrally in the Collective's self-understanding, notably in its neo-Marxian emphasis on bottom-up, directly democratic organization. Echoing the Black Creation statement, Johnson describes this ethos succinctly: ‘we followed Jamesian ideas, based on the principle that every cook can and should govern. We were a small organisation that was having a big impact – that small meant big.’Footnote ¹⁵³

Note Johnson's stress on smallness, egalitarianism: again, community-oriented locality. For it is on this front that we can locate a first, key way that Race Today's application of James's thought forces us to rethink avant-gardism: specifically, the group's departure from vanguardism. The Black Jacobins is instructive in this regard. As already discussed, James's history posed a critique of Toussaint, who in San Domingo adhered to a proto-vanguardist notion of struggle. In leading from afar, Toussaint largely ‘ignored [the] black labourers’. But to ‘bewilder the masses’, James maintained, ‘is to strike the deadliest of all blows at revolution’.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Elsewhere, the sage derided Maurice Bishop's New Jewel Movement in Grenada for the same reason, as it lacked a mass-populist, grassroots base of the kind Johnson depicts. It was precisely this concern for directly democratic organizing that led to James's chief revision of Marxist theory following the disappointment of the Soviet Union. By employing a rigid selection process, forming an elite technocracy, and stifling ground-up participation, ‘the vanguardist party structure of the New Jewel Movement, based upon the doctrinaire model that Joseph Stalin had constructed’, exhibited an authoritarian tendency inimical to an authentic socialism comprising ordinary people. Toussaint, Bishop, and Stalin all failed to realize James's essential, if paradoxical insight: they failed to become popular vanguards. Put in the context of 1970s Britain, the words of John La Rose (another colleague of James's) are germane. Groups such as Race Today and La Rose's New Beacon practised ‘leadership but not vanguardism’.Footnote ¹⁵⁵

Already we see a counterpoint to the futurists, say, who both the BAM and Black Creation spurned, and even the CAM's ‘powerful’ figures. Yet there is a second aspect of James's thought, implicit above, that allows us to appraise Race Today and Johnson's ventures as a pivot from even those populist avant-gardes such as the BAM. Earlier, I noted how Baraka argued for the eminence of experimental musics such as free jazz inasmuch as they would be ‘consistent with the spiritual and communal needs, if not the tastes, of a black popular audience’.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Thus, the ‘self-conscious’ musics of Coleman and Coltrane could be theoretically justified, while the commercial releases of Warwick could not. Contrastingly, James was deeply sympathetic to pop culture; so too was Johnson, who, after all, released reggae records – pop music – through major labels such as Virgin and Island, and his own LKJ Records later on.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Bearing these sympathies in mind, I want to argue that James's theories regarding the vernacular arts particularly – the everyday practices of ‘the people’/populi – beckon us to re-evaluate the matter of taste within the history of both Eurocentric and black avant-gardes generally. For Black Creation summarily adopted Jamesian theories, and it did so in ways that bring us squarely back to the black radical tradition tout court.

As Cedric Robinson has suggested, one of the chief lessons of The Black Jacobins entailed James's insistence that capital effects social negations at two sites of its expropriation. ‘Capitalist accumulation gave birth to the proletariat at the manufacturing core; “primitive accumulation” deposited the social base for the revolutionary masses in the peripheries.’Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Under such ‘racial capital’, the enslaved elaborated what James saw to be distinct and distinctly dissident vernacular cultures, as in Vodun ritual in San Domingo – or much later, in calypso or reggae. Robinson dubs these practices ‘mediums[s] of conspiracy’ opaque to colonial authorities. While perhaps a no-brainer to today's Marxist, in his time, James's conjecture signalled a theoretical upheaval, suggesting that contestation was possible outside the intelligentsia, and – here we approach a big reason for Moten's admiration for James – it proposed that local ethnic cultures could serve as a revolutionary motor. This latter insight departed from the closed, class-geared dialectic of historical materialism; in positing a black Marxism, James reimagined orthodox Marxian temporality by exposing how the racialized labour structure of slavery engendered a tight-knit group whose emphatically cultural-expressive interconnections made them ‘closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time’.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ This was a culturalist Marxism, yes; but it was performative, too. As Moten avers, James's stress on the vernacular performatively ‘bent’ the dialectic from its outside, giving the dialectic an embodiment, a ‘dialect’, which ‘retemporized’ Marxist teleologies in revealing how the tastes of ‘the people’ afforded an alternative to vanguardist models. James's anti-vanguardism and communally oriented politics – like Race Today's – were intertwined; both were mediated by cultural ‘excesses’.

It is on this matter of the cultural politics of the vernacular that I wish to conclude. Or, to put it bluntly, might Johnson represent a modern Dessalines? The supposition is not as farfetched as it might seem. To be sure, Johnson is not the only historical figure to have adopted a programme comparable to that of the Haitian's. Neal, as mentioned earlier, similarly esteemed community-oriented engagement. So too did jazz avant-gardists such as Archie Shepp, who as Porter observes declared reluctantly that he would abandon the avant-garde altogether should it mean he would adequately ‘reach black people through music. “Even if the artist has to forsake some of his most cherished things – then he must forsake them. If I have to get into rock and roll, somehow, I've got to slide into that.’’’Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Yet musical avant-garde studies – including black musical avant-garde studies – have tended to underplay this fact. Moreover, they have tended to sideline those pop-inclined programmes, like Johnson's, that ‘slid into’ mass-popular tastes and capitalist relations.Footnote ¹⁶¹ In contrast, my intention is to double-underline these aspects, and to place them into the foreground. In no way do I want to create a false binary, here: the political-aesthetics and ethics of movements like the BAM, the CAM, and Johnson's work could and often did overlap considerably; given their shared concerns for popular taste and community activism alike, a group like the Last Poets in fact strikes one as a good analogy for Johnson's work (as we saw, Johnson knew the Last Poets well). Instead, what I hope to emphasize is the way that Johnson, taking his cue from the CAM, re-applied stalwart avant-gardist principles such as nation language to genres, formats, and media he knew would productively engage mass culture and the community in the same stroke, without or at the very least with subdued reluctance. Accompanying this transferal, the poet co-facilitated political and cultural movements ‘hand in hand’ at Race Today, producing ‘appositional’ dub poems that documented and raised awareness about such campaigns as the GLAC and DHAC – precisely through popular technologies such as the LP. Meanwhile, initiatives such as Black Creation enlisted the efforts of community-based artists from the ground-up and laterally, rather than hierarchically. Johnson ‘induced’ others to ‘produce’, forging a model of ‘progressive cultural production’ through which a broad swath of black Londoners could participate, and – as in the Renegades – collaboratively instigate counter-hegemonic struggle.Footnote ¹⁶² The RYCAC did something similar, albeit largely outside an artistic purview.

Since the 1970s, Johnson has accrued a legendary status in the history of black British poetry – as Caesar puts it, a ‘Godfather’ status.Footnote ¹⁶³ Even Penguin Books has recognized the poet's achievements, by according the poet a volume in its Modern Classics series in 2002.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ But one suspects that Johnson would brush these accolades aside: they countermand the anti-hierarchical methods that James espoused and Race Today applied. Pace Caesar, I would argue that we can generatively think of Johnson in the way Moten thinks of Dessalines, as disruptive of hierarchy, promoting a politics premised in a ‘radical aisthesis’ – much like dub poems themselves. The avant-garde is in the audience. And that avant-gardism is excessive, in a manner that resembles the appositional explosiveness of Voices, ‘Five Nights’, and other works. For Moten, the ‘mediums of conspiracy’ announced by the slaves in San Domingo – Vodun, song, and dance – animated ‘mysterious and black magical politico-economic spells and spellings’ which in turn anticipated James's theories.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ As if to point out Johnson's position in relation to readers of Race Today or participants in the Renegades or the denizens of Shepherd's or the poet's role in the GLAC or DHAC, Moten illuminates this distinct style of animation as follows:

‘Leaps! Leaps! Leaps!’Footnote ¹⁶⁷ The avant-garde is in the audience. So was Linton Kwesi Johnson.