Taqralik Partridge

Panel Abstract: This panel explores the urban storytelling and spoken word of Taqralik Partridge, Kinnie Starr and Ian Kamau. Their work, through a mix of language, vocal techniques, and movement, is culturally hybrid and politically charged.

As described by the Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, cultures need to reach out to one another and to borrow from one another. Storytelling and spoken word create what the Chicana author and cultural theorist, Gloria Anzaldúa, called the third self which is greater than the sum of its distinct cultural parts. That hybrid self resists the unitary aspect of each new paradigm by straddling two or more cultures. Partridge, Starr and Kamau vocalize the rhythms of resistance and resolution that such straddling entails. By embodying the tensions between self and other, margin to centre, these artists cultivate a common ground of communication.

Hailing all publics presents storytelling and spoken word as expansive media of cultural exchange, turning personal and culturally-specific experience into the experience of those listening. As a result, the respective Inuit, First Nations, and African heritages of Partridge, Starr and Kamau influence diverse audiences. The acoustic spaces these artists construct are, in this sense, crucibles of new and renewed social relations which deny the primacy of Western commodity culture. At issue, however, is the power of performance practice. Can the word stop the Western clock of technological globalization? This panel questions the power of performance to intervene, reshape, and reinvigorate – transforming, as Michael Warner posits, the space of public life itself.