I am extremely grateful to Vincenz Serrano for his extensive and perceptive review of Make It the Same in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. Here’s how the review begins:
In his chapter on Kamau Brathwaite in Make It the Same: Poetry in the Age of Global Media (2019), Jacob Edmond demonstrates how the Caribbean poet explored the aesthetics of copying, deploying approaches like “tape-based iterative audio practice[s]”, “tape recordings and transcriptions of oral stories and songs” (38), photocopied typescript—“a practice of print versioning analogous to the dub plate or the tape recorder” (53)—and, aided by word processing software, the Sycorax video style. For Edmond, these audio, print and digital technologies enabled Brathwaite’s efforts in decolonising English, manifested in works like The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1973), History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (1982; 1984; 1993), and numerous recordings of his readings and lectures, such as the ones at New York’s Bowery Poetry Club (2004) and the International Poetry Forum in Pittsburgh (1998). The Brathwaite chapter—with its confluence of close reading, historical contextualisation, media analysis and postcolonial critique—typifies the rest of Edmond’s book: Make It the Same shows the author’s globe-spanning grasp of emergent and established poetries, understanding of a combination of theoretical persuasions, and persuasive deployment of a range of interpretive methods.
You can read the full review here.
Make It the Same: Poetry in the Age of Global Media 