Intended AudienceTrade
ReviewsBreath is an important theme in Dub . As is gratitude in the face of environmental decline. Because our ancestors navigated so intimately through change, Gumbs sets out to prove, so can we. . . . [An] exquisitely rendered love letter. . . ., Offering a sweeping, thoughtful, and exquisite meditation on Sylvia Wynter's work, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's poetic engagement represents a new and unique way of encountering and paying homage to Black feminist theory and Black feminist theorists. A beautiful and graceful text, Dub will inspire readers to return to and to rethink Wynter's work and her place within African Diaspora studies, Caribbean studies, and Black feminist studies., [G]round-breaking. . . . Gumbs's trilogy embraces the lyric beauty in the acts of naming, remembering, and finding one's way back to the source. . . . Reading Gumbs's books feels like reading an archive that will someday, who knows maybe even someday soon, usher in an era of radical transformation., I am so grateful that Alexis Pauline Gumbs listens to Black women writers and scholars the way that she does. . . . Dub is a book of our now. As tends to be the case with the books that Gumbs summons, the timing of Dub is prescient. With our breathless global attention set to registering the various way a virus connects all life forms, I cannot think of a better time for a book that tarries with and makes ceremony with Sylvia Wynter., Both a gathering and a recovery, this last pivotal volume in a trilogy commits to a new poetics. . . . Dub wakes us concussively. Both wrenching and playful, it offers instructions (two sets of them), warnings, and its central bid to listen to the undrowned., People throw around terms like Genius and Magic frequently but if you open this book, flip to any passage, and don't feel moved from your soul then I will assume that you don't have one. 5 Stars aren't enough for this sacred text but it's all we got so . . . ., Grounded in oríkì-like references to Sylvia Wynter's oeuvre, Dub simultaneously contracts and expands to create a new form of proprioception, which allows us as a species, phantomed by the corrosive and lacerating actions of history, to locate ourselves in relation to other species, as well as within the time-space continuum of the yet to be, the now and the 'past.' Part prayer, oration, exhortation, commentary and story, Dub amplifies ancestral voices to become mythopoesis in the making.
Table Of ContentA Note ix Request 1 Commitment 3 Instructions 5 Opening 7 Whale Chorus 15 Remembering 21 Nunánuk 34 Boda 40 Anguilla 47 Another Set of Instructions 66 Red August 74 Relation 92 Prophet 94 And 110 Skin 114 Losing it All 120 It's Your Father 126 Edict 145 Edgegrove 153 Unlearning Herself 163 Birth Chorus 177 Conditions 194 Jamaica 199 Blood Chorus 202 Shop 214 Orchard 220 Cycle 227 Saving the Planet 231 Staying 239 Letting Go 246 Acknowledgments 253 Notes 261 Crate Dig 273
SynopsisThe concluding volume in a poetic triptych, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's Dub: Finding Ceremony takes inspiration from theorist Sylvia Wynter, dub poetry, and ocean life to offer a catalog of possible methods for remembering, healing, listening, and living otherwise., The concluding volume in a poetic trilogy, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's Dub: Finding Ceremony takes inspiration from theorist Sylvia Wynter, dub poetry, and ocean life to offer a catalog of possible methods for remembering, healing, listening, and living otherwise. In these prose poems, Gumbs channels the voices of her ancestors, including whales, coral, and oceanic bacteria, to tell stories of diaspora, indigeneity, migration, blackness, genius, mothering, grief, and harm. Tracing the origins of colonialism, genocide, and slavery as they converge in Black feminist practice, Gumbs explores the potential for the poetic and narrative undoing of the knowledge that underpins the concept of Western humanity. Throughout, she reminds us that dominant modes of being human and the oppression those modes create can be challenged, and that it is possible to make ourselves and our planet anew., The concluding volume in a poetic trilogy, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's Dub: Finding Ceremony takes inspiration from theorist Sylvia Wynter, dub poetry, and ocean life to offer a catalog of possible methods for remembering, healing, listening, and living otherwise. In these prose poems, Gumbs channels the voices of her ancestors, including whales, coral, and oceanic bacteria to tell stories of diaspora, indigeneity, migration, blackness, genius, mothering, grief, and harm. Tracing the origins of colonialism, genocide, and slavery as they converge in Black feminist practice, Gumbs explores the potential for the poetic and narrative undoing of the knowledge that underpins the concept of Western humanity. Throughout, she reminds us that dominant modes of being human and the oppression those modes create can be challenged, and that it is possible to make ourselves and our planet anew.