Hugh Hodges

My principal areas of interest, both as a researcher and as a teacher, are popular music and the literatures of Africa and the West Indies. I’m at work on a book about pop music in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain: it was a politically turbulent period in Britain (race riots, the Falklands War, hunger strikes by imprisoned IRA members, the smashing of the Trade Unions and massive unemployment) and popular music had critical and insightful things to say about it all. I’ve also published articles on Bob Marley, Nigerian Afro-beat pioneer Fela Kuti, Trinidad calypsonian Lord Kitchener, and the dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson.This is where my interest in music overlaps with my interest in Africa and the West Indies. I regularly offer courses in both African and West Indian literature and they generally include plenty of music, because I don’t think you can separate West Indian literature, say, from reggae, calypso and soca, or Nigerian literature from highlife, juju and Afro-beat.  And even if you could, why would you want to?  I’ve also written about the Jamaican poets Lorna Goodison and Geoffrey Philp and the Nigerian novelists Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Chris Abani. My book on Jamaican poetry, Soon Come, was published by the University of Virginia Press.