A Book Launch and Performance Event
Centre for Caribbean and Diaspora Studies, Department of English and Comparative Literature in association with Black.Arts.Gold presents dubbin poetry: the collected poems of d'bi.young anitafrika.
Performances by d'bi.young anitafrika, Mohammed Rowe, Deaira Hermani and Christopher Oliver
SPECIAL GUEST: Professor Joan Anim-Addo
Spolrusie Publishing is thrilled to announce the April release of d’bi.young anitafrika's newest work, dubbin poetry: the collected poems of d’bi.young anitafrika, to be launched with a short book tour: Dublin Ireland (April), Toronto Canada, London UK and Lillehammer Norway (May), Bristol UK and Berlin Germany (June), Nottingham UK and Malmo Sweden (July).
What does it mean to self-recover? How do we decolonize our bodies?
Where do we turn for spiritual guidance? When is it right to fight for what you believe in? From whom do we learn how to love?
How do we hold ourselves accountable for the harm we cause?
Is it our responsibility to create new systems of emancipation as we tear down old oppressive ones?
d’bi.young asks us to consider these urgent questions in her new book dubbin poetry: the collected poems of d’bi.young anitafrika; continuing Dub poetry’s legacy of connecting the dots between self-development, artistic activism and social change. The volume features three of her previously published books: art on black (Women’s Press, 2005), rivers & other blackness between us (Women’s Press, 2007) and OYA (Spolrusie, 2015). It also includes a new title, black lives matter, (only available in this collection), featuring monologues and scenes from her most celebrated theatrical productions. David Austin - independent scholar and author of the recently published Dread Poetry and Freedom: Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Unfinished Revolution (Pluto, 2018) - authors the Foreword.
As a queer Black feminist performance artist, educator, and mother, d’bi.young possesses a unique voice that crosses cultural boundaries and transcends artistic disciplines. Her work fiercely and compassionately navigates the personal within the political; the micro within the macro. Her poetry, theatre and Anitafrika Method have been challenging and inspiring global audiences for over two decades. d’bi.young’s new volume ofcollected dub poems chronicles the continued evolution of her Dub poetics.
d’bi.young anitafrika’s performances and writings remember, celebrate, and interrogate enduring and plural Black and Caribbean radical traditions, while also dramatising a quest for courage and the strength to survive, love, struggle, and hold space in the midst of extraordinary violence. Her work seeks out what is incomplete in past emancipation projects and rehearses ways of extending these - telling stories, amending experiences and inserting questions into the gaps and fissures of past struggles.
- Ford Smith, Honor. (2018). ‘Performing Queer Marronage: The Work of d’bi.young anitafrika’, in Gatchalian, C.E. et al (eds). Q2Q: Queer Canadian Performance Texts. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, pp. 239-243.