Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes the poetry and community organizing practices of Cape Town-based Lingua Franca Spoken Word Movement within the context of the movement to decolonize higher education. I argue that their work creates literary spaces for anti-colonial poetry production and education.

Paper long abstract:

In South Africa, poetry is often described as existing in two spaces, each tied into questions of cultural prestige: the alienated space of the classroom and the popular space of performance or protest. The recent push to decolonize higher education, however, has destabilized this division. As Rafael d'Abdon and Denise Newfield (2015) demonstrate, contemporary schoolrooms are negotiating space for a multimodal poetic practice. The divide between elite and popular blurs as works like Koleka Putuma's Collective Amnesia are assigned in university classrooms and slam poets like Roché Kester are included in elite events like Poetry Africa. This paper explores the decolonization of poetry in South Africa through the work of the Lingua Franca Spoken Word Movement. Lingua Franca is a poetry collective based in Cape Town, where they run youth poetry workshops, organize arts festivals, host open mics, and curate multicentric performances. At the 2015 Open Book Festival, Lingua Franca organized a panel on spoken word poetry that launched a debate about the current state of performance poetry - influenced by U.S. and British poets - and its future. Beginning from this debate, this paper traces Lingua Franca's institutional and formal influence on South African performance poetry. Over the past three years, Lingua Franca has hosted a series of performances and festivals focused on indigenizing the poetry scene in South Africa through multimodal performances. This paper argues that their hybrid approach to form, in conjunction with the poetry workshops and arts festivals, offers a model of anti-colonial poetry education.