Performing Rituals of Self-Narration: Benjamin Zephaniah’s Storytelling

The article focuses on Benjamin Zephaniah and his choice of performance poetry as a militant artistic practice, which led him to gain a prominent position in the British cultural contemporary panorama. His controversial position within mainstream culture is analysed considering the performative character of literature intended as an event, and exploring the condition of the contemporary postcolonial writer, who is becoming more and more a literary celebrity. Zephaniah narrates himself and his art on multiple platforms and by making use of different media, trying to transfer a shared past (and present) through storytelling performances which operate not much as a form of archive, but as a form of empowered repertoire.