Join us from 25th April – 2nd May for a JWIL Twitter residency with Natalie Wall, exploring artivism and monodrama in the work of d’bi.young anitafrika. Follow along at @jwilonline
Jamaican-Canadian dub artist d’bi.young anitafrika, creator of the anitafrika method and spolrusie publishing, is a black queer feminist dub poet who has authored twelve plays, four collections of poetry and recorded seven albums. anitafrika has reinvented the way that we understand black womxn’s theatre. As part of JWIL‘s recent issue on dub poetry, we published Natalie Wall’s essay “Catching Bullets with Her Ass: Matrilineality and the Canadian Dub Poetry Tradition in the Work of d’bi.young anitafrika.” This residency explores anitafrika’s critical and creative practice in the dub tradition.
anitafrika’s life and work has been shaped by the three main transnational hubs of dub. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, they came into the dub performance scene and tradition in Toronto. anitafrika is currently pursuing a PhD at London South Bank University investigating how Black womxn theatre makers globally embody theatre in a decolonial praxis; they are also Artist-in-Residence at the University of Toronto’s New College and curator of Incubate, a monthly performance and open mic event at Theatre Peckham. anitafrika is also now completing Dubbin Theatre, an anthology of their plays written from 2000-2022, and Dub Poetry to Dubbin Theatre.
Natalie Wall is currently the Research Impact Manager at Queen Mary University of London. Originally from Canada, Wall focuses on black Caribbean Canadian women’s performance, artivism, and antiracist scholarship and practice, and is currently writing a monograph titled White Generosity, to be published by Emerald Publishing, which examines the historical and contemporary construction of global reparations and black freedom.
