Exit Page: The Gen X-Y-Z of Global Spoken Word Poetry

Introduction

We all know of it, and we all have engaged with it, whether knowingly or begrudgingly, in open mics or while doomscrolling on social media. Traditional poetry critics call it the death of art; practitioners say, it is what makes poetry come to life! What we are talking about is “spoken word poetry,” also known as “performance poetry” or “poetry performance” in different contexts. It is also often referred to as "slam poetry," though the distinctions between spoken word poetry and slam poetry include the type of competition, the setting and staging of performances, and the purpose of each as poetic performance; those distinctions are sometimes irrelevant, too. The genre of spoken word has taken the world by storm since the turn of the millennium, with international events and world championships gathering poets from around the globe. Subsequently, the past two decades have also led to poetry performance research being established as a field of critical inquiry.

For this cluster, we, Shefali Banerji and Claudia Sackl, two scholars of spoken word poetry, currently based in Austria and Switzerland respectively, have invited spoken word poets, researchers, and organizers from around the world to shed light on developments and transnational exchanges in their respective spoken word scenes. Our aim was to initiate an international conversation on the art, craft and global context of spoken word poetry that both builds on scholarly work and, at the same time, makes room for community-based and semi-formal conversations about this performance practice. As such, we were keen on taking our contributors' as well as our own positionalities within the field of spoken word poetry into account.

Many of our contributors are not only researchers of performance poetry but also poets and organizers themselves. They know their respective scenes from several standpoints, and, in certain cases, have teamed up with other practitioners to combine scholarly and practice-based perspectives in their contributions. Some of our contributors are poets who take us behind the scenes of their specific spoken word circuits in a self-reflexive fashion. Others are scholars who write on spoken word scenes they have critically engaged with over several years, which enables them to offer deep, diachronic insights into the development of these scenes. In all cases, the rich and diverse experiences and expertise of our contributors enable astute observations and insights into the craft, evolution and politics of poetry performance around the world.

Spoken word poetry is personal, as it is political. Hence, it is only fair that we reveal why we were drawn to spoken word poetry and research in the first place, and what it has taught us about the performance practice thus far, before introducing the cluster and its contributions.

Shefali's Journey to Spoken Word

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

The month is July. The year is 2014. The setting is an undergraduate English literature lecture. Four sets of ceiling fans, older than any of the students present in the classroom, spin excruciatingly slow. Sweat pools across foreheads, dribbles down cotton shirts. Someone wipes their neck. Another sips icy cool water from their bottle. And then, the professor exclaims, passionately:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate

Many of us disgruntled undergrads back in the day joked that if Shakespeare had ever been subjected to Kolkata summers, he would not have bothered with Sonnet 18. There is, after all, nothing redeeming about Kolkata summers, and to compare your lover to a tropical summer's day would undeniably be construed as an insult. And yet, we memorized, analyzed, appreciated unquestioned the brilliance of "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" in our classrooms.

I came to spoken word poetry around this time, in my late teens, discontent with the canonical (dead white mostly male) poets that were a vital part of my university education, but who were definitely “unrelatable.” During this time, urban India was slowly awakening to the practice of contemporary spoken word poetry, thanks to the virality of Button Poetry on YouTube, although oral poetry was a longstanding tradition in our culture(s). Spoken word poems on heartbreak, politics, climate change and the lot resonated more with 19-year-old me than most poetry I was studying in my degree program. Spoken word was direct, confrontational, political.

Inspiration followed consumption. In 2016, I started engaging with the Kolkata spoken word scene, which too was emerging around this time. Early on, I attended events by collectives like Poetry Paradigm and Papercup Poetry Slam, performing at their open mics and slams, meeting fellow poets. This was also the time a national scene was gradually being forged, and more established grassroots collectives, such as Airplane Poetry Movement and Soul Slam, would visit my city (and others) to host collaborative events and make poetry connections. Airplane Poetry Movement would go on to also organize the first National Youth Poetry Slam in 2016. In the course of the next few years, as the national scene became even more streamlined (and by this I mean, all things national spoken word became concentrated in Mumbai and Delhi), national collectives like Kommune India started launching city chapters, and as other local initiatives fizzled out, Kommune Kolkata became my new home. However, in March 2020, when nationwide lockdowns were announced in the aftermath of COVID-19, in-person events disappeared, and so did the Kolkata scene. We slam poets, as we called ourselves, having been subjected to the gravity of the pandemic, moved on to pursue careers in medicine, business, law, academia. I, undoubtedly, put spoken word poetry in my past. Or so I thought.

In 2022, I joined the Poetry Off the Page project, led by Julia Lajta-Novak at the University of Vienna, as a PhD researcher to study the emergence of spoken word theater in the UK. My research led me to explore innovative long-form poetry shows that experimented with form, content, as well as sonic and visual meaning-making. With access to archival material, which featured shows by Roger Robinson, SuAndi, Lemn Sissay, and more, attendance at live poetry events across the UK, and the opportunity to interview and engage with poets, I found my way back to spoken word poetry. I was excited about studying the artistic, political and transformative potential of the genre closely, in spoken word theatre, yes, but also in other forms of poetry performance. Since 2022, with encouragement from my doctoral supervisor, Julia Latja-Novak, and fellow PhD researcher Claire Palzer, I have been moonlighting as a poet-performer in the Austrian and Indian circuits, while researching and teaching on British spoken word poetry, always on the lookout for ways to bring all three scenes together.

Claudia's Journey to Spoken Word

Unlike Shefali, I was not introduced to spoken word poetry in my teens but came to it only after finishing most of my graduate education. Ironically, it was printed books which ignited my passion for performance poetry. While always interested in the intermingling of different art forms, media and disciplines, I come from literary studies and have, for many years, worked on and with children's and young adult literature. I first started to move my literary interests beyond the page during the years 2018 and 2019, when the German book market saw several translations of young adult novels from the US in which rhythm and performance art such as rap or spoken word played an important role. Among these books were The Hate U Give and its follow-up On the Come Up by Angie Thomas, Sunny and Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds and, of course, The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo.

As part of my work for a Vienna-based institute for research and teaching on children's and young adult literature (whose acronym STUBE also denotes a comfy 'parlor' in German - truly an appropriate description of the heartwarming and supportive atmosphere in which I was lucky enough to have worked for eight years), I had been engaging with children's and young adult literature from global majority authors for some years. I became especially interested in the above-mentioned publications because they were finding novel, self-assertive forms of poetic expression and, in many cases, blurring conventional boundaries between prose and poetry. One book that stood out especially in this context was the verse novel The Poet X, which follows the protagonist Xiomara as she finds not only her emerging subversive poetic voice but also the courage to vocalize and embody her verses. The novel culminates in her performance at her school's Spoken Word Poetry Club.

One of the perks of being a literary scholar is that you often get the opportunity to engage profoundly with the literary works you love. As I was making The Poet X the subject of my investigation in university lectures and conference papers, I also deepened my research into spoken word. An interest that grew, after some years, into one of my main research and teaching foci. I have been encouraged in this also by my students, many of whom exhibited remarkable excitement when we were addressing spoken word in our classes in Austria and Switzerland - not least because many of them were writing, and in some cases even performing, poetry themselves. Providing students with the opportunity to engage with local, experienced and inspiring practitioners, such as Precious Chiebonam Nnebedum or Yasmin Hafedh, further demonstrated the significance of performance poetry as embodied experience. This aspect was also highlighted by one of my favourite memories during my journey as a researcher of spoken word:

It was in 2022. May 26. The first evening of the annual conference of the German Research Society for Children's and Young Adult Literature (GKJF), which the STUBE team, under the heading of Körperhaltungen: Bodies and Embodiment in Children's and Young Adult Media, had brought to Vienna for that year's installment of the annual gathering of scholars and appassionados of children's and young adult literature. For the opening of my plenary talk, I played a recording of Elizabeth Acevedo's 2014 performance of her spoken word piece Hair. In the poem, the Afro-Dominican artist addresses the intergenerational transmission of historical trauma, structural racism, Black resistance and the intersectional entanglements of beauty ideals, gender norms and social hierarchies. During the performance, Acevedo actively uses her own body to emphasize and create meaning, repeatedly pointing to her hair, skin and chest, lifting up her curls in order to give them more space ("this wild tangle of hair that strangles air") and thumping on her stomach ("you call them wild curls, I call them breathing"). After the poet-performer had spoken her last lines, the conference attendees erupted into loud, enthusiastic applause. It did not matter that Elizabeth Acevedo was not in the room and that we had only been watching a recording of her poetry performance. Much like Xiomara in The Poet X, we were all experiencing and reacting to it as embodied subjects.

I let the words shape themselves hard on my tongue.
I let my hands pretend to be punctuation marks
that slash, and point, and press in on each other.
I let my body finally take up all the space it wants.

I toss my head, and screw up my face,
and grit my teeth, and smile, and make a fist,
and every one of my limbs
is an actor trying to take center stage.¹

How We Came Together

As is the case elsewhere (and at the risk of generalizing, perhaps everywhere), the University of Vienna requires doctoral students to present or defend their project proposals early on in their research. In Vienna, however, this proposal defense is public, and thus, it is common for students to attend each other's presentations. We defended our project proposals on the same day and were intrigued by the fact that both of us were working on spoken word poetry, albeit in Anglophone and Germanophone contexts. This was in 2023. In 2024, Shefali presented a talk on "Digital Poetry Performance in the Times of the Pandemic" for Claudia's panel "Performative, Transmedial, (Post-)Digital: Contemporary Poetry Off the Page by and for Young People" at the second international conference of the interdisciplinary research platform Youth Media Life. Following this, we have teamed up on several fronts, writing together, teaching together, and have a few other joint endeavors in the pipeline this year.

This cluster also emerges from that collaboration. In 2024, Shefali joined Lajta-Novak and Rachel Bolle-Debessay as a co-convenor to organize an international conference on poetry performance research in Vienna. Around this time, we also initiated conversations about the present cluster and submitted our proposal to Post45 Contemporaries. Both initiatives shed light on the importance of having creative-critical conversations on the origins, developments and histories of spoken word poetry across the globe. While the conference Poetry Off the Page, Around the Globe focused on scholarly advances and interventions in the field, this cluster takes a reflexive turn. Through this collection of essays, interviews and creative explorations, we wish to facilitate a dynamic exchange between scholars, practitioners, educators and people who navigate all three roles across various international spoken word scenes and transnational routes.

The Cluster

In Exit Page: The Gen X-Y-Z of Global Spoken Word Poetry, we invite scholars and practitioners to deliberate upon their respective scenes of spoken word practice and/or research. The title of this cluster, albeit a mouthful, has two parts to it. Exit Page celebrates the alternative modes of poetic production that we have come to embrace in the Anglophone world since the early twentieth century. Exit Page also challenges the primacy ascribed to traditional print poetry and brings into view the currency of spoken word. Finally, Exit Page is a nod to the positionality adopted by the cluster editors toward academia, in which we consciously choose to move away from paywalled and print-centric academic publishing routes while actively embracing open-access digital avenues and public scholarship. Further, through this cluster, we not only want to initiate dialogue with fellow scholars of poetry performance but also with practitioners of the genre, who enable us to study and critically engage with spoken word.

The Gen X-Y-Z of Global Spoken Word Poetry hints at developments in spoken word scenes around the world over the past few decades. Not only do our contributors come from different geographical contexts, but they also engage with poetry performance across different time periods and generations. This spatiotemporal diversity is also reflected in the stages of advancement that various international spoken word scenes are currently situated in, and which our contributors also comment on. Hence, owing to the generational variety of not only our contributors but also the scenes they talk about, we decided (in good humor!) to borrow the Gen X-Y-Z terminology from pop culture discourse for our cluster. Through Exit Page: The Gen X-Y-Z of Global Spoken Word Poetry, we hope to offer you, the reader, a glimpse into the richness, craft, intricacies and politics of global poetry performance scenes.

The Contributions

The forms of the contributions are as diverse as the perspectives of our contributors. Some are written in the tradition of academic texts; others combine creative text with essayistic reflections. Some take the form of a dialogic exchange; others entangle their scholarly perspectives with personal experiences.

Javon Johnson in "Cartography of Care" emphasizes the role of mentorship for practitioners of poetry performance, especially in today's algorithmically mediated spoken word and poetry slam circuits. Using experiential knowledge and looking at the circulations of spoken word across our contributors' scenes of practice, research, or both, Johnson confirms that the genre's strength lies in its infrastructures of (non-institutionalized) support, a view we agree with. He concludes by offering ten working proposals to build a sustainable infrastructure of support for practitioners. Coincidentally, these working proposals find their thematic resonance in many of our contributors' pieces.

In "Learning is a Place Where Paradise can be Created", Nandini Varma writes about the efficacy of spoken word poetry in Indian classrooms, inviting us on a poetic journey with Slam Out Loud (SOL) and a few of their mentees. SOL, a Delhi-based NGO focusing on arts education, enables underprivileged children in under-resourced schools to "build creative confidence skills such as curiosity, imagination, analytical thinking, team work, emotional awareness".The author details the impact of SOL mentorship on students from low-income households, exploring how the initiative empowers young voices. Indeed, spoken word has the power to transform young lives.

In turn, "[y]oung people's creative endeavors can position them as civic agents", observe Jen Scott Curwood and Korina M. Jocson. In the dialogic piece "Poetry as Civic Transformation", drawing from their previous work with youth poets in Australia and the United States, Curwood and Jocson offer us a framework to study poetry as an avenue for facilitating civic change. Curwood details her research collaboration with Bankstown Poetry Slam, Jocson recounts her time in June Jordan's Poetry for the People program; together, they illustrate how young people practice spoken word to link their cultural histories and personal stories to wider political discourses and concerns in different national contexts. The importance of mentorship in helping young poets find their voice is also emphasized in this conversation.

Encounters with spoken word poetry demand attuned listening. Rachel Bolle-Debessay engages with the sonic potential of poetic performance in "Sounding Home" to uncover how the genre generates a sense of belonging for diasporic poets. Combining her personal experience of listening to reggae with her critical study of dub poetry, Bolle-Debessay complicates constructions of home and belonging. Through close listening and reading, she reveals the workings of the sonic imaginary in Jean Binta Breeze's "Tweet Tweet", which enables a different way of homecoming for both Breeze and Bolle-Debessay.

Diasporic belonging is also a subject of Rupinder Kaur Waraich's essay "Stages of Belonging", which sheds light on the flourishing, community-driven Birmingham poetry performance scene. Reflecting on her own journey as a spoken word poet and organiser, Wairach introduces the reader to projects rooted in the South Asian diaspora such as Gully Collective and Azaad Art. Invoking Benjamin Zephaniah's "pioneer[ing]" and "unapologetically political" poetic style, and linking it to the history of the city's grassroots initiatives around poetry performance, the poet sheds light on poetry performance's civic and cultural potential in fostering community and promoting social justice.

The community building potential of performance poetry is further highlighted by Yasmin Hafedh in her piece "Austria's Spoken Word Scene, or My Home Sweet Home", in which she emphasizes the cultural and linguistic diversity of poetry slam circuits in Austria. Connecting her poem "Wo kommst du her?" ('Where are you from?'), which Hafedh has kindly translated into English for this cluster, to her reflections on the emergence, dissemination and institutionalization of spoken word poetry in Austria, Hafedh merges lyric with prose in her text. The hybrid form of the piece also illustrates the productive cross-fertilization of the poetic and the reflexive.

Form as well as mediality play a central role in Claire Palzer's essay "Poetry Videos and Spoken Word Poetry in Ireland", in which she explores the affordances and rising popularity of poetry videos. Palzer observes in this piece that foregrounding the sonic and espousing a collaborative spirit, poetry videos have come to constitute an important way for recording and disseminating work for many spoken word poets. Emphasizing that poetry videos are an alternative pathway of publishing that does not rely on access to literary institutions, Palzer's piece also positions poetry videos as vital objects of study for scholars of spoken word.

A wide spectrum of spoken word forms and research methods are addressed in Beatrice Jane Ekesa's article "Spoken Word Poetry in Kenya". Building on her longstanding research on the spoken word scene in Kenya, Ekesa traces the emergence and evolution of this versatile art form over decades. From intimate gatherings at Kwani? Open Mic and spaces such as Fatuma's Voice to Slam Africa, the author maps Kenya's spoken word poetry as "a dynamic cultural form shaped by performance, transnational exchange, and digital mediation,” drawing our attention not only to the linguistic and cultural heterogeneity of the scene but also its roots in African orature.

Another diachronic perspective on spoken word poetry is offered by Fabiana Oliveira de Souza and Emerson Alcalde in their contribution "Poetry Slam in Brazil over the Last Decades". In this piece, the two authors, as scholars and practitioners of the genre, introduce us to the seventeen-year-long journey of poetry slam in Brazil. They relate how it has proliferated, starting with the platforms ZAP! and Slam da Guilhermina, into a flourishing landscape of diverse slam formats, such as 10-second slams or events exclusively aimed at women and/or the LGBTQIA+ community. In many ways, their contribution illustrates how poetry slam enables access to artistic forums in public spaces, especially for underprivileged populations.

Together, the nine contributions offer multi-faceted perspectives into spoken word poetry as an aesthetic, social and political practice. Illustrating the many ways poetry performance has manifested in different countries, the pieces also highlight the genre's evolution (technological and otherwise) over decades. In this context, many of the contributions address the challenges that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic and the increasing importance of digital spaces. Today, moving between the stage and the screen, spoken word poetry continues to reinvent itself across the globe.

To conclude this walkthrough, we return to the beginning. Spoken word is indeed what brings poetry to life, or at least, to public stages and private screens. We hope you enjoy this cluster and find the contributions insightful, engaging, inspiring.

Exit: cluster editors.

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Shefali Banerji is a poet-performer from India, currently a PhD researcher on the ERC project "Poetry Off the Page" at the University of Vienna. Their research investigates the origin, development, and influences of spoken word theatre in the UK. Their wider research interests include postcolonial studies, 20th and 21st century poetry and short fiction, as well as queer studies. To know more about their creative and academic work, visit shefalibanerji.com.

Claudia Sackl is a research and teaching assistant at the Department for Social Anthropology and Empirical Cultural Studies (ISEK - Popular Cultures) at the University of Zurich and external lecturer at the Department for German Studies at the University of Vienna. After working in adult education for eight years, where she has organised a number of literary events, conferences and writing workshops, she is now focusing on her PhD project, in which she investigates contemporary anglophone and germanophone Afrodiasporic literatures in Germany, Austria and Switzerland on and off the page. She has published, given talks, organised panels and taught university courses on spoken word poetry. 

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Acknowledgements

The cluster editors deeply appreciate the work put into the making of this cluster by our eleven contributors: Emerson Alcalde, Rachel Bolle-Debessay, Beatrice Jane Ekesa, Yasmin Hafedh, Korina M. Jocson, Javon Johnson, Rupinder Kaur Waraich, Fabiana Oliveira de Souza, Claire Palzer, Jen Scott Curwood and Nandini Varma. We are also thankful to the editorial board of Post45 Contemporaries, Francisco Robles, Rachel Greenwald Smith, Gloria Fisk, Farah Bakaari, Danielle Fuentes, Leland Tabares, and Mara McDaniel, for their invaluable time and support.

Funding Statement

Shefali Banerji's contributions to 'Exit Page: The Gen X-Y-Z of Global Spoken Word Poetry' have been supported by the 'Poetry Off the Page' project, which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement no. 101002816).

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References

1. Beatrice Jane Ekesa, Heterogeneity and Performance of Spoken Word in Kenya (master thesis, University of Nairobi, 2016). Digital Repository. ↩︎
2. Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Heinemann, 1986), 1. ↩︎
3. Ruth Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa, 2nd ed (Open Book Publishers, 2012), 48. ↩︎
4. Karin Barber, The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics: Oral and Written Culture in Africa and Beyond (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 67. ↩︎
5. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2003), 41. ↩︎
6. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 27. ↩︎
7. Ngugi, Decolonizing the Mind, xiv ↩︎
8. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York University Press, 2006), 3.
   ↩︎
9. Tanja Bosch, Social Media and Everyday Life in South Africa (Routledge, 2020), 1; Martin N. Ndlela and Winston Mano, eds., Social Media and Elections in Africa: Theoretical Perspectives and Election Campaigns (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). ↩︎
10. Bosch, Social Media and Everyday Life in South Africa, 1; Ndlela and Mano, Social Media and Elections in Africa; see also Beatrice Jane Ekesa, Restaging Spoken Word Poetry in New Media (PhD diss., University of Nairobi, 2023). ↩︎
11. Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa, 26-27. ↩︎
12. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Marxism and Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271-313. ↩︎
13. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (Grove Press, 1963), 97-144. ↩︎
14. Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa, 48. ↩︎
15. Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa, 48-49. ↩︎
16. Ngugi, Decolonizing the Mind, 42-44. ↩︎
17. Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa, xxxii. ↩︎
18. Raya Wambui, Interview with the Author, Nairobi, 2016. ↩︎
19. Arjun Appadurai. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 27. ↩︎
20. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 27; Susan B.A Somers-Willett, The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity and the Performance of Popular Verse in America (University of Michigan Press, 2009). ↩︎
21. Wambui, Interview. ↩︎
22. Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa, 55. ↩︎
23. Beatrice Jane Ekesa, A. Rinkanya, and K. Wabende, "Spoken Word Poetry in Kenya: An Emerging Genre of Oral Literature in Social Media Spaces," The Nairobi Journal of Literature 10, no. 1 (2022); Beatrice Jane Ekesa, Restaging Spoken Word Poetry in New Media (PhD Thesis, University of Nairobi, 2023). ↩︎
24. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 3; Eric Shouse, "Feeling, Emotion, Affect." M/C Journal 8, no. 6 (2005). ↩︎
25. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2003), 4. ↩︎
26. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 2; Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa, 51; Martin N. Ndlela and Winston Mano, eds., Social Media and Elections in Africa. ↩︎
27. Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness, 2. ↩︎
28. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 27; Jenkins. Convergence Culture, 6. ↩︎
29. Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa, 55. ↩︎
30. Ekesa, Restaging Spoken Word Poetry in New Media. ↩︎
31. Ngugi, Decolonizing the Mind, 1. ↩︎
32. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 2; Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa, 51. ↩︎
33. Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2008); Shouse, "Feeling, Emotion, Affect." ↩︎
34. Ekesa, Restaging Spoken Word Poetry in New Media. ↩︎
35. Dorphan. Interview with the author, conducted remotely via Powtoon (author in Columbia, South Carolina, USA; Interviewee in Nairobi, Kenya) July 15, 2022. ↩︎
36. Barber, The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics, 72. ↩︎
37. Dorphan, Interview. ↩︎
38. Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois (Duke University Press, 2017), 11. ↩︎
39. Ekesa, Restaging Spoken Word Poetry in New Media. ↩︎
40. Barber, The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics; Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness, 2. ↩︎
41. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 3. ↩︎
42. Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa; Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness. ↩︎
43. Ekesa, Heterogeneity and Performance of Spoken Word in Kenya. ↩︎

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