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Phanuel Antwi: „Anticolonial Dreaming: The Elemental Poetics in Dub“

2022 Marshall McLuhan Lecture

January 28, 2022; 6-7pm (Berlin)

With the annual Marshall McLuhan Lecture, transmediale invites a figure in the Canadian cultural landscape, whose work expands on McLuhan’s media theories in the context of contemporary culture and society. The 2022 transmediale Marshall McLuhan Lecture will be held by Phanuel Antwi.

The history of dub poetry (literature) is also how a history of mechanical reproduction (technology) transformed artistic and popular consciousness. For his McLuhan lecture, Phanuel Antwi explores the ways that, for dub poets, transformation is a poetic practice with interrelated questions on poetics and material resources. From the additive and subtractive techniques that architectures the dubbing process that engineers the interconnectivity of media/mediums of dub – from the transformation of words to dance to music to theatre to visual art. Given this interconnectivity of mediums, it should come as no surprise that the transformational poetics of dub flirts with the transformational forces of the elements (fire, wind, water, and earth). Framing this connection as “the nature of culture” (Trouillot 1992), Antwi considers the elements as forms of technopoetics, and suggests that the resources of dub poetry inaugurate a method for anti-colonial dreaming, one that insists that dreaming is not a passive activity that happens at night. Dub poets, Antwi argues, teach us ways that dreaming is a method of organising into being a different world. The elemental poetics in dub, then, wakes us into states of assertion and refuses the complacency of the world as is.

The transmediale Marshall McLuhan Lecture is a cooperation between transmediale and the Embassy of Canada.