Amiri Baraka’s development as an artist and thinker has raised vexing questions about race, nation, and class as forms of social identification and mobilization. A decade later, in the mid-1970s, he ...renounced Black nationalism for a Marxist politics that envisioned leading roles for African Americans and other peoples who had been subject to colonial domination and exploitation. The book focuses on the philosophy of history that Baraka began to devise early in his career and fully formulated during the four decades preceding his death in 2014, a period that critics have generally neglected.
Books Recently Published Procell, James; Ertz, Matthew
Music Library Association. Notes,
06/2021, Volume:
77, Issue:
4
Journal Article, Book Review
Peer reviewed
Sonic warrior: my life as a rock and roll reprobate. Cool town: how Athens, Georgia, launched alternative music and changed American culture. Greek and Latin music theory: principles and challenges.
Like many Black intellectuals that came of age as apartheid was tightening its grip in the 1950s, Lewis Nkosi (1936-2010) left South Africa on a one-way ticket. Although he outlived apartheid and ...returned to his native land on and off after 1991, he lived abroad in the United States in the 1990s and in Europe in the 2000s. Although allied with the African National Congress in exile, he wrote skeptically about emphatic anti-apartheid writing. His essays from the 1950s on reflect his preference for cosmopolitan and experimental authors from Dostoyevsky to Kafka, in other words for modernism broadly speaking, and his creative writing reflects this preference in the ironic and satirical rather than the usual earnest treatment of the struggle. While several critics have noted this modernist preference, none have examined the influence of Black American authors on Nkosi's writing. This omission demands attention, as Nkosi's creative writing, especially drama for stage and radio, draws deeply from Black Americans, even when he steals themes, phrases, and characters without acknowledging sources. The Rhythm of Violence written and performed during his first US sojourn 1960-61, borrows style and phrasing from Black Beat poet Ted Joans, the radio drama "We Can't All Be Martin Luther King," broadcast on BBC 4 in 1971, lifts title and tone-unacknowledged-from activist-writer Julian Bond's ironic poem responding to expectations that all Black intellectuals emulate Dr. King, and The Black Psychiatrist borrows from the decidedly unironic Black nationalist Amiri Baraka. Like Bond and essayist James Baldwin, Nkosi balanced a commitment to struggle-in his case, presenting Black African and Caribbean writers to the BBC and to readers abroad-with an ironic attitude to what he called the absurdity of apartheid and other forms of racism.
This article delineates Sean Bonney’s ambivalence towards 20th Century sound poetry and his complex relationship with sound and visual poet Bob Cobbing (1920-2002). To do this the article reads one ...of Bonney’s early poems ‘For Bob, Cobbing Through the Soundhole, Where Cobbing IS’ – a poem Bonney read at Cobbing’s funeral – alongside Our Death, Bonney’s last book. The way Bonney responded to Cobbing’s life and death may offer a guide to how we respond to Our Death after Bonney’s. In their shared commitment to counter state violence, the article identifies an anti-Thatcherite politics alongside a poetics of vulnerability and hospitality, which they extend to each other, to the interned, the displaced and the dispossessed.
The essay considers Sean Bonney's work in the period 2008-2014. It focuses on his PhD thesis on Amiri Baraka (completed in 2013) and the publications Baudelaire in English (2008) and Letters Against ...the Firmament (2015). The thesis explored tensions between aesthetic and political commitment in Baraka's work during the 1960s, a period of particular importance in Baraka's development, as it marked his shift from 'beatnik' bohemianism to black nationalism. The essay uses the thesis to examine Bonney's own exploration of the possibilities of a revolutionary poetics in this period. in the context of the political events of the time. It traces his attempts to dissolve bourgeois subjectivity and the transformation of the individual subject into a collective subjectivity through his engagement with Baudelaire and Rimbaud and his arrival at a militant poetics which aims to express 'complex, multiple ideas ... with a singular directness'.
Historian Daniel S. Luck has noted in Selma to Saigon that “the civil rights movement and the debates over the Vietnam War were at the center of the turbulence of the 1960s” (1). While true, one also ...recognizes that the afterlives of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War are momentous historical events with which America continues to contend. Several African American writers of the post-civil rights/post-Vietnam era, including Percival Everett, have written works of fiction that continue to grapple with the afterlives of these cataclysmic historical events. Set in the American West, Everett’s 1985 novel Walk Me to the Distance finds its protagonist, David Larsen, a returning Vietnam veteran, at loose ends. David winds up stranded in a small, remote town, Slut's Hole, Wyoming, where he eventually decides to stay. His decision to settle in the West is as much influenced by his romanticization of life on the American Frontier as it is with his disgust for a rapidly changing country where he feels he no longer belongs. In this essay, I argue that Walk Me to the Distance is not only an astute meditation on Frontier Mythology and Frontier justice associated with the early settlement of the American West but also that the novel reveals that these foundational myths and ideas continue to be paradigmatic features of American culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Through an extended analysis of an excerpt from Vijay Iyer and Mike Ladd’s In What Language, this essay engages with the ongoing deepening of the theory of improvised interactivity. Few studies ...within music research have considered the rich body of works combining music and poetry in improvising contexts. This article advocates for listening to Iyer and Ladd’s co-created work through the lens of sociable musicopoetics, an analytical stance that hears the interactivity in their creative processes. Through analysis and interviews, this article suggests that the sociable musicopoetics framework helps work against the restrictive binaries of music/language and composition/improvisation and enriches the understanding of improvised music and poetry combinations by highlighting the meaningfulness of interaction itself.
This paper presents a social semiotic analysis to explore the extent to which the ideological point of view in Amiri Baraka's Slave Ship (1967) has been semiotically communicated by a number of ...oppositional signs: visual (darkness versus light), audible (loud/hard music versus low/soft music), and vocalic (scream versus laughter). More specifically, this paper explores the six signs' semiotic potential for making meaning by shedding light on the way they operate as conduits of the ideological viewpoint and the way their semiotic staging is textually associated with particular linguistic indicators guiding the pragmatic interpretation of the play. To this end, the paper draws on two theoretical strands: a social semiotic approach as introduced by Hodge and Kress (1988), Kress and van Leeuwen (2001), and van Leeuwen (2005); and Short's (1996) checklist of linguistic indicators of viewpoint. Two main findings are revealed here: first, the six signs are carriers of the ideological viewpoint by acting as action predictors and motivators, suffering signals, suffering-source highlighters, apathy and arrogance indicators, situation commentators, and call-response markers; and, second, the six signs serve as narratorial mediators, representing the dramatic equivalents of third-person narrators in prose fiction.
When Militancy Was in Vogue Manditch-Prottas, Zachary
The Black scholar,
10/2021, Volume:
51, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
In the comical vignette published in the Pittsburgh Courier, "Simple's Comment on Color: It's a Gasser," Langston Hughes debates with his most enduring fictional character, the humorous and wise ...Harlem everyman, Jesse B. Simple. Their jocular dispute questions the relationship between corporal Blackness and "Black thought." I Things move swiftly from the abstract to the personal when Simple states that because Hughes "is colleged" he has "Black skin but not a Black brain." In response to this allegation Hughes cites author and emerging public figure Amiri Baraka (then Leroi Jones)3 as a counter example of a "college man" who exemplified "Black Nationalist" consciousness. In 1965, when the short piece was published, Baraka personified an intellectual artistic class that retained, even regulated, a folk-centered conception of Black authenticity; Baraka was seemingly a foolproof counter figure to Simple's argument. Simple, who is no fool, however, responds to Hughes with a question that seemingly had little to do with the topics of education and nationalist ideology, "Didn't I read in the papers where he married a white woman? "5 For Simple, all that needed to be known was that Baraka's wife, Hettie Cohen, was white. In Simple's estimation, despite appearing Black and gushing Black Nationalist rhetoric, Baraka was an example of one whose "Black head was filled up with white thoughts."6 The accusation that Baraka was insufficiently Black would have seemed a ludicrous charge at that time; indeed, who was Blacker than Baraka? This paradox is Hughes' point. The sardonic exchange between Hughes and his folksiest character is a clever act of signifying in which Hughes both affirms and questions the Black author's relationship to whiteness. Hughes validates Baraka as the prime Black Nationalist pundit, through the retort to Simple that Baraka's "private life was his own business" and his marriage not an appropriate topic for evaluating his political stance, while raising questions regarding the significance of Baraka's ties to whiteness. Indeed, Baraka's marriage to Hettie Cohen was not an issue for Hughes at all. However, his relationship with white audiences was. Simple's provocative personal question acts as a sly gesture toward Hughes' anxieties regarding Baraka's broader relationship to whiteness and, more precisely, his concern regarding how white audiences received Baraka's work.
Popular music writing has made for strange colleagues and quickly lost legacies. I want to sketch some of them and suggest how they continue to influence the US version of popular music studies, ...arguably more so in our moment than in the previous period that codified an academic approach. I'll be anecdotal, alive to particulars of language, affiliation, method and form rather than attempting a quantification. Ranging from William Billings in 1770 to Daphne Brooks in 2021, I'll explore how such key framings as vernacular, sentimental and literary have shaped the nature of books on song. My hope is that, in synthesizing the larger history, I can suggest why so often this work could be characterized as, to use one of Robert Palmer's favourite words, unruly.
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