The power of the word: Dub poetry as Canadian educational critique | The power of the word is all-important in African and African-derived cultures. Whether the African griot, or the black preacher, or the dub poet, the word is performance and politics. This course examines the language and performance of dub poetry as a multifaceted linguistic, cultural transgressive, radical, populist, activist art form. It depicts the realities of contemporary black lives in Canada and calls into question the very ideas of multiculturalism. This Jamaican-derived artistic form celebrates the popular language that the British-style colonial education taught the people to despise. Dub poetry provides an analytic springboard to carry out an intersectional and critical inquiry into many problematics in everyday Canadian life that have implications for our educational theorizing practice from critiques of “acceptable English” and one’s “nation language”, to transnational identities and youth marginalization. We will use dub poetry as a set of political epistemological and political statements about the possibilities and limitations of Canadian multicultural society. The course will be a dialogue between theoretical scholarship the pedagogy of dub poetry. The aim of the course is to re-think educational possibilities through this critical, intersectional lens. Canadian Jamaican dub poets will be invited to the class intermittently. At these times the general public will also be invited to attend sessions.