Dub in the Front Room: Migrant Aesthetics of the Sacred and the Secular

Abstract

This article aims to explore, how the struggle over the sacred and the secular is enacted within the material culture of the front room as an index of the double consciousness that takes place in the black every day. The scared is often reduced to the purely religious, but unshackling it, and engaging with the sacred as a spectrum of spiritual experience that illuminates its dialogic relationship with the political, and therefore the secular. Reclaiming the sacred provides a critical praxis towards decolonising the legacy of coloniality in the context of postcolonial modernity. As a cultural institution of self-making, valorising the material culture of the front room as a space of black interiority resists the racist trope that we live on the street, and have no homes to go to, with families and values. This interiority has shaped, and been shaped by the cultural politics of postwar Caribbean migration, and reveals the rich complexity of “black domestic life” that the “generality of society” rarely understands. Connecting the spiritual with the political provides a psychic recuperation towards resisting and healing from trauma as a process in an ongoing structuring of colonial power, cultural imperialism, and racial violence. This article will draw on research in curating my installation-based exhibitions, The West Indian Front Room (2005-06) and Rockers, Soulheads and Lovers: Sound Systems Back in da Day (2015-16).

Keywords

• the front room
• creolisation
• sound system