“Dream Defenders and the Inside Songs” explores the extent to which Percy Shelley's poetic legislation is able to counter racial divisiveness and antiBlackness in “our” communities and universities. It enlists Fred Moten’s poem “barbara lee” and Benjamin Zephaniah’s characterization of Shelley as the “original dub poet” to claim that what is “wholly political” about the semantic and sonic relays activated in Shelleyan songs is their capacity to disrupt the associational logics undergirding white-body supremacy and literary Anglo-Eurocentrism. Tracking the process enacted in “barbara lee,” by which reliance on “the inside songs” enables Representative Lee to vote against President Bush’s military authorization act, the chapter proposes some pedagogical and creative-critical revisions to Shelley studies that might effect a similar “inside outward opening” of Shelley. Leftist celebrations of “Red Shelley” have emphasized the collective and street-performative dimensions of his then-unpublished protest songs. The chapter probes the salience of a “black” Shelley by recasting two familiar Shelleyan devices. One emphasizes sound’s activation of embodied knowledge that circumvents the priority granted to textual literacy. A second accentuates association as a process that expands the affective-cognitive connections mobilized by a word and by encounters with another person. In other words, the intimacy between who we know and what we know is an underacknowledged fact of scholarly method. Diversifying one is key to diversifying the other in an ongoing cycle. Cultivating the two promises to transform “defenses” of poetry into live performances of antiracism.

This chapter explores how an epistemology of sound has contributed to the rebellious and coalitional genre of dub poetry in 1970s and 1980s Britain. The development of black British dub in the 1970s is both timely in its ability to articulate a demotic poetics accessible to the communities from which it speaks and untimely in its politically impertinent capabilities. While Afro-Caribbean poets dominate the genre, the writing often remains committed to questioning the boundaries of race and nation. The form itself is constituted by a variety of mediums which shape an inherently hybrid poetic expression. Through an interrogation of the work of three influential black British dub poets – Linton Kwesi Johnson, Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, and Benjamin Zephaniah – this chapter traces the means by which these poets cultivate manifold insurgent sonic solidarities. While firmly located within the frame of the written word and the materiality of the printed page, their poetry is impelled by the sonic and at times performative qualities of the poet. The writing of Johnson, Breeze, and Zephaniah achieves its lyrical alliances through the ineffable and kinaesthetic entanglement between the text and the sound.