Join us in welcoming D. S. Marriott as he discusses his collection, Before Whiteness!
About Before Whiteness:
A searing indictment of anti-Black social and political violence by British Jamaican poet and leading scholar of Afro-pessimism D.S. Marriott.
A book that turns Blackness into a question of reading, seeking to destroy and reimagine the various traditions of inscribing and decoding Blackness in poetry, Before Whiteness draws on a sweeping range of references from medieval Beowulf to contemporary UK grime. Born in Britain but now living in the U.S., Marriott trains his analytical gaze on grim American subjects like the Middle Passage and lynchings, yet also finds inspiration in African American poets and artists. The book ends with “Another Burning,” a mournful elegy for the victims of the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in London and stirring rebuke of the structural racism of contemporary UK society. With its critical transatlantic perspective, Before Whiteness provides poetic resistance to the injustices experienced by people of color in the postcolonial Anglophone world.
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Poet and scholar D.S. Marriott was born in Nottingham and educated at the University of Sussex, UK. He is the author of the poetry collections Incognegro (Salt, 2006), Hoodoo Voodoo (Shearsman, 2008), The Bloods (Shearsman, 2011), and Duppies (Commune Editions, 2019). His chapbooks include In Neuter (Equipage, 2012) and Lative (Equipage, 1992). His work is sometimes associated with the Cambridge school of poetry. In his critical and creative work, Marriott, of Jamaican heritage, draws on postcolonial thought and thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and is a leading theorist of Afro-pessimism. His critical books include On Black Men (Edinburgh University Press and Columbia University Press, 2000), Haunted Life (Rutgers University Press, 2007), and Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being (Stanford University Press, 2018). He has taught at many universities and is currently based in Oakland, CA.
Before Whiteness is available at Lost City Books!