Dub Poetry as a Black Atlantic Body-Archive

Rereading dub poetry under the pressures of and with the resources of black feminist and queer theory, and treating the practice of dub poetry as a production of a sound archive, one that embodies and aurally animates the intimacies of the black Atlantic, this essay highlights the creative labor of this artistic project (the ways dub poets link sound to body to place to textuality) and helps us consider the conditions under which something new in black modernity is produced. Through this reconceptualization of the art form, the essay draws attention to ways dub extends Paul Gilroy’s insights into the black Atlantic and the challenge of experiencing dub as a sound archive but also as a phenomenology that raises questions of embodiment and gendered bodily labor.