La musica caylpso e il dub poetry. Espressioni musicali e letterarie di resilienza e resistenza

ABSTRACT • Calypso Music and Dub Poetry, Expressions of Resilience and Resistance in both Music and Literature. This paper examines “London is the Place for Me” (1948) by the Trinidadian author Lord Kitchener and “Inglan is a bitch” (1980) by the Jamaican author Linton Kwesi Johnson. Their lyrics, analysed through a postcolonial and multidisciplinary lens, represent hybrid forms of artistic expression known as calypso music and dub poetry. Originated in the Caribbean as a means of communication among slaves in the plantations, in the second half of the twentieth century, calypso music becomes an instrument of resilience and denunciation of the hostility of the so-called ‘Mother Country’ towards migrants of the “Windrush Generation”. First emerging in the Jamaican dancehalls of the nineteen seventies, making its way to the ‘Mother Country’ shortly after, dub poetry becomes a politicised art form aimed at denouncing the harsh and inhumane working conditions migrants were subjected to along with forms of racism and prejudice prevalent in Great Britain at that time.