An article by Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing Andrew Rippeon has been published in the current issue of Contemporary Literature. His article, "Bebop, Broadcast, Podcast, Audioglyph: Scanning Kamau Brathwaite's Mediated Sounds," examines the role sound media have played in the development of the Barbadian poet's politics and poetics.
Attending not only to Brathwaite's poetry, but also to his numerous broadcast interviews and to his important but fugitive early essays, Rippeon demonstrates the revolutionary potentials heard by the poet in American bebop, Caribbean beguine and calypso, and the medium of broadcast radio itself. Rippeon's article shows the degree to which Brathwaite models his poetic practice upon these forms, and engages through his poetry with the politics of information distribution in the anti- and post-colonial Caribbean context.
