Genre and its ‘Diss-contents’: Twenty-First-Century Black British Writing on Page and Stage

Abstract

Writing on genre and its delineations, Daniel Chandler observes that in ‘literature the broadest division is between poetry, prose and drama’. Although a consensus is identifiable in the loose groupings of texts according to their generic characteristics, Chandler notes that ‘one theorist’s genre may be another’s sub-genre or even super-genre (and indeed what is technique, style, mode, formula or thematic grouping to one may be treated as a genre by another)’ (1997: 1). The designation of genre blending or crossing—as framed by the perception of how certain genres are ‘meant’ to operate for certain creative modes—can signal a writer’s position in relation to mainstream culture and its processes of critical reception, canon-making and ultimately, cultural longevity. While the protean capacities of language as sounded and heard, or written and read, offers two distinctive conduits for creative expression—that are not mutually exclusive but mutually implicated—certain frameworks of cultural reception and critique have accorded differential status to the spoken and the printed word. This is especially identifiable when accounting for the intermediality of dramatic-poetics and the poetics of performance in contemporary black British literature, where the possibilities of trans-generic and poly-generic writing disrupt the straightforward application of critical generic verities. Intermediality is understood here, as offering separate material conduits for a text (printed in a book, performed live in a theatre), its communication by more than one modality, and the relationship of the chosen medium to social and cultural institutions. As Nirmal Puwar (2004) argues, it should be remembered that projections of neutrality onto social and cultural spaces is highly questionable. These are as racialised and gendered by power relations as the bodies who enter into them—or who are perennially absent.

The dual meaning evoked in ‘diss’ is from the 1980s US-derived hip-hop slang meaning to disrespect, show disdain for, and homophonically in the prefix ‘dis’, to convey dissatisfaction with something. Linguistic and cultural polysemy is a key factor in this chapter’s discussion of genre and aesthetics.