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13 Race, Nation, Class and Language Use in Tom Leonard's Intimate Voices and Linton Kwesi Johnson's Mi Revalueshanary Fren
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Published:June 2011
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Abstract
Tom Leonard and Linton Kwesi Johnson have made use of place-specific spoken language in their poetry, which is represented in the text through experiments with orthography and phonetics. Leonard uses ‘phonetic city dialect’ in Intimate Voices, and Johnson's poetry, as set out in Mi Revalueshanary Fren, brings together a Jamaican-English-speaking voice with a musically rooted ‘sound’. The language of Leonard's text seems principally to justify a class reading rather than a colonial one. The epithet ‘scruff’ in ‘Unrelated Incidents 3’ might be read as an attempt to reify class identity as a form of the ethnic labour, structuring the hierarchical divisions of labour by denoting class as an essentialist category. The comparison of Leonard and Johnson's dialect work suggests that the effort to undermine the linguistic hierarchies that have governed poetic form can be effectively utilised to expose the political lines of privilege that such hierarchies support.
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