NOTES ON THE UNDERGROUND Reeves, Roger
The Virginia quarterly review,
04/2023, Volume:
99, Issue:
1/2
Journal Article
Despite my daughter and her five-year-old friend bouncing about the house, their bodies aimed toward razing the place to the very beams and caulking, I could not turn my attention away from Daniels ...and the police beating him, coercing him to confess to a murder he did not commit. Sometimes, the prisons they take me into are the Hollywood set-design cellblocks of the late '80s-steel bars, the clanging and slamming of cell doors, inmates' hands hanging out through the bars, the inmates' bodies, somehow, not there. When the police pulled the boys from their car and made them stand in front of the woman whose house was robbed, she pointed out that my friends were, in fact, boys-children-and not men. Change the region, the clouds and sky, the temperature, the decade, the neighborhood, the legislature, the police car's color and the color of the officers' hands, and nothing changes but a few particularities of my dream.
Amiri Baraka is unquestionably the most recognized leader of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and one of the key literary and cultural figures of the postwar United States. While ...Baraka's political and aesthetic stances changed considerably over the course of his career, Brick City Vanguard demonstrates the continuity in his thinking about the meaning of black music in the material, psychic, and ideological development of black people. Drawing on primary texts, paratexts (including album liner notes), audio and visual recordings, and archival sources, James Smethurst takes a new look at how Baraka's writing on and performance of music envisioned the creation of an African American people or nation, as well as the growth and consolidation of a black working class within that nation, that resonates to this day. This vision also provides a way of understanding the encounter of black people with what has been called "the urban crisis" and a projection of a liberated black future beyond that crisis.
Myrick-Harris examines why a discussion of Gospel Music is omitted from Blues People and ponders if a wiser Amiri Baraka ever turn his attention to this genre and incorporate discussion of it into ...the fabric of later explorations into Black Music?
Amiri Baraka's play Dutchman serves as a warning against the intermingling of races and encourages black Americans to resist passivity and create their own self-determined identities. The play ...depicts a young black man named Clay who meets an older white woman named Lula on a NY subway train. Lula manipulates Clay, highlighting the power dynamics between black and white relations. The play aligns itself with the Legend of the Flying Dutchman, emphasizing the perpetual existence between the worlds of the living and the dead. Clay's blackness is seen as life, while whiteness is seen as death. Clay's refusal to denounce his black identity ultimately leads to his murder. Baraka labels the play a modern myth, elevating the importance of identity politics and suggesting that mythology exists in contemporary society. By rejecting double-consciousness and uniting as a race, black Americans can create a collective self-determined identity. Dutchman seamlessly connects art and activism to identity politics, creating a political mythology that calls for black consciousness to thrive.
Bean argues that critical blind spots have thus far prevented either poetry or theatre criticism from making full account of the messy, dynamic art form that goes, in this book, by the name of ..."poets' theatre." In the absence of an always clear connection between political commitments and aesthetic choices, these theatres' dedication to "prodding, critiquing, training, and satirizing the audience" represents their most urgent agenda (9)—one strongly motivated by theories of social performance gaining traction across disciplines at the same time. Bean's fifth chapter on the poet-playwright Carla Harryman, who hails from the school of San Francisco "Language" poets, illuminates contemporary poets' theatre's "intentional rupture" of community—its emphasis on "individual identification in the shared space of the theater" (27).
Amiri Baraka foi um dos mais influentes escritores negros do século 20, tendo suas poesias, peças, ensaios e obras ficcionais amplamente publicados. Antes ativo membro da comunidade literária beat, ...Baraka começou um processo de desassociação do movimento, após ser pessoalmente impactado pelos turbulentos acontecimentos dos anos 1960, momento de transição ideológica que a obra trabalhada, Black Magic (1969), captura poeticamente. Nesse artigo, busco explorar como operar a tradução do título da obra por meio de uma perspectiva afrorreferenciada, isto é, tendo como referencial epistemológico-teórico o Mulherismo Africana e as teorias macumbeiras de Simas e Rufino (2019).
...the obsessions that drove me into and then rapidly away from drama were those most beautifully summarized in a few thoughts of Marx: by mixing our labor with the earth, we change the external ...world and thereby change our own nature. In other words, abolition begins and ends with "groupings" of people struggling to end the stranglehold of racial capitalism on the earth and all of its life forms, and build a sustainable, equitable, and ethical world for all. Change over time does not explain the persistence of racialized poverty, violence, mass imprisonment, a system that leaves communities vulnerable to destruction, abandonment, and/or persistent structural racism—what Gilmore calls, by way of Amiri Baraka, "the changing same." Gilmore's approach to history as dialectical, dynamic, sedimented, syncretic, and always geographic is on display in her account of how prison construction, policing, and the Pentagon are a continuation of imperialism, and how the foundational violence of New Haven as a center of gun manufacturing converged with Yale's place in military research and development—processes obscured by narratives of the region's contribution to liberalism, political theory, and the like.
The 1960s and ’70s witnessed hundreds of race-related uprisings across major US cities. Often provoked by white-authored shootings of Black people, these rebellions galvanized a generation of ...activists—including Black Arts Movement dramatists Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Lola E. Jones, and Carol Freeman—to create works that sustain the hearts, minds, and souls of Black Americans. While Baraka’s Arm Yourself, Or Harm Yourself (1967) offers a representative engagement with the Black Power rhetoric of gun ownership, hegemonic masculinity, and white-authored gun violence, Sanchez’s The Bronx Is Next (1968), Jones’s The New Nigger, or Who’s Afraid of William Faulkner (1976), and Freeman’s The Suicide (1966) provide a unique departure. Collectively, their works produce womanist thought that complicates Black Power rhetoric of gun ownership and masculinist understandings of Black liberation. Recovering these less-studied works reveals not only how the Black Arts Movement was not so uniformly masculinist as it has sometimes been depicted, but also how these early womanist interventions laid a critical foundation for the Black Lives Matter movement of today.
