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Articles

Volume 33, Number 1 (2012)

To Be Dub, Female and Black: Towards a Womban-Centred Afro-Caribbean Diasporic Performance Aesthetic in Toronto1

  • Ric Knowles
Submitted
May 17, 2013
Published
2012-01-01

Abstract

This essay traces the contributions of Afro-Caribbean women, particularly Rhoma Spencer, ahdri zhina mandiela, and d’bi.young anitafrika, to a developing performance aesthetic in Toronto that is grounded in Caribbean cultural texts. It focuses on ways in which the work of these women has consciously challenged and queered Canadian and Caribbean theatrical and performance forms as well as heterosexist and masculinist cultural nationalisms and colonial modernities. Spencer, through her company Theatre Archipelago, employs a “poor theatre” aesthetic, a presentational sensibility, exhuberant performances, and a richness of language, all grounded in Caribbean traditions such as carnival, ’mas, and calypso, to speak in complex ways about the politics of class, gender, and race with a clear emphasis on women. mandiela, through her company bcurrent and especially through her plays dark diaspora…in dub! and who knew grannie, has invented and developed a new form, dub theatre, out of the Jamaican-based traditions of dub poetry. d’bi.young anitafrika has followed in mandiela’s footsteps, contributing to the women’s dub tradition through the invention of what she calls “biomyth monodrama” as exemplified in her sankofa trilogy. These women have constituted a Toronto within the city that functions as a transformative space operating at the intersection of nations, sexualities, and performance forms to queer traditional theatrical hierarchies, together with the largely masculinist ethos of much Caribbean performance and the narrow chronopolitics of modernist colonial “development.” They have created and continue to develop entirely new, empowering, “womban-centered,” and “revolushunary” Afro-Caribbean forms that are (re)grounded in traditions of the grannies, the griots, the nation languages of the people, and movement and language that emerge from and celebrate Black women’s bodies in a transnational Canadian-Caribbean diaspora.