'David Austin offers nothing less than a radical geography of black art in his (re)sounding of Linton Kwesi Johnson. Dread Poetry and Freedom is as serious, and beautiful, as our life' Fred Moten, poet, critic and theorist
'Austin's moving and richly textured study captures both the urgency of Johnson's historical moment and his resonance for ours' Shalini Puri, Professor of English, University of Pittsburgh
With the intensity of a devotee and the precision of a scholar, David Austin skilfully traverses the dread terrain of Linton Kwesi Johnson's politics and poetry'
Carolyn Cooper, cultural critic, author of Noises in the Blood:
Orality, Gender and the 'Vulgar' Body of Jamaican Popular Culture
'An expansive exploration of Caribbean political and cultural history.
Caribbean political theory is animating literary and cultural studies diasporically - Austin's book demonstrates this elegantly'
Carole Boyce Davies, author of Caribbean Spaces,
Professor of Africana Studies and Literature at Cornell University
Standing at the forefront of political poetry since the 1970s, Linton Kwesi Johnson has been fighting neo-fascism, police violence and promoting socialism while putting pen to paper. For Johnson, only the second living poet to have been published in the Penguin Modern Classics series, writing has always been 'a political act' and poetry 'a cultural weapon'.
In Dread Poetry and Freedom, David Austin explores the themes of poetry, political consciousness and social transformation through the prism of Johnson's work. Drawing from the Bible, reggae and Rastafari, and surrealism, socialism and feminism, and in dialogue with Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James and Walter Rodney, and W.E.B. Du Bois and the poetry of d'bi young anitafrika, Johnson's work becomes a crucial point of reflection on the meaning of freedom in this masterful and rich study. In the process, Austin demonstrates why art, and particularly poetry, is a vital part of our efforts to achieve genuine social change in times of dread.
DAVID AUSTIN is the editor of Moving Against the System (2018) and winner of the 2014 Casa de las Américas Prize for Fear of a Black Nation.