Michael A. Bucknor
Department of Literatures in English,
University of the West Indies, Mona Campus

Title: Writing Performance Criticism

In her inaugural professorial lecture at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Carolyn Cooper acknowledged Barbara Lalla as the critic who labeled her work: “Performance Criticism.” Lalla’s naming of the critical practice that assesses the ways in which Caribbean performance traditions inform literary works as “performance criticism” made me realize that not much work has been done outlining this Caribbean critical and cultural practice. Although Lalla’s christening of the field seems recent, we have had a number of literary and cultural critics who have been practicing performance criticism for some time now. However, what Lalla’s recent framing of Cooper’s Noises in the Blood in terms of performance does is to draw attention to that tradition of criticism that has contended with the crossings in Caribbean literature between verbal reference and verbal rhythm, the scribal and oral traditions, print and performance. While I am aware that critics like Maureen Warner-Lewis and Edward Baugh have begun to ask crucial questions about the relationship between performance and literary studies, I would like to trace, in this paper, the conceptual connections and disconnections among a number of key cultural critics of the Anglophone Caribbean (Brathwaite, Rohlehr, Morris, Cooper, Habekost, Dawes) as a way of teasing out some of the issues that arise from these critical constructs. What critical purchase can be derived from such terms as “nation language” (Brathwaite), “voice print” (Morris, Rohlehr), “verbal riddim” (Habekost), “verbal dance” (Cooper) or “reggae aesthetics” (Dawes) used in performance criticism? This paper will begin to identify key figures, outline key concepts and trace key issues as way to begin to write a history of Caribbean literary criticism around performance.