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"Amiri Baraka"
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Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn : the collected letters
\"The letters of Amiri Baraka and Edward Dorn offer a vivid picture of American lives connecting around poetry during a tumultuous time of change and immense creativity\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones): Black Nationalist Utopian Thought in the 1960s
This article represents a study of one of the most distinctive, yet neglected, utopian visions of the late 1960s and early 1970s in America. It examines the Black Nationalist struggle of that decade as an expression of utopia with special reference to one of its leaders, Amiri Baraka. The article shows how Baraka’s Black Nationalist works express a prophecy of creating a new reality for Blacks in America. Baraka’s ideal society, his utopia, it is shown, is reached by “breaking the continuity of history,” that is, by a total separation from what he views as the “rotten and hellish” white American society. Black Americans should create, instead, an alternative Black society through what Ashcroft calls “the myth of return,” reimaging the Black man’s glorious pre-slavery African past, that is, going back to his origins—the home of his ancestors (Africa). The article argues the reconstruction of a number of Eastern/African elements (ancient Africa, its traditions, culture, heritage, and language) that Baraka describes as “keys to a new black world.” The article concludes with a discussion of the reasons behind the collapse of Baraka’s Black Nationalist utopian project in 1974. As Baraka started to move toward the left due to the influence of Mao, Nkrumah, and Cabral in the mid-1970s, he realized the clash between his utopian ideals (equality, freedom, justice, self-determination...etc.) and the unidealistic foundation of his utopia. This new Barakan Socialist utopian vision remains untouched and is thus recommended for a profound examination in the future.
Journal Article
Word Dealing Out Poetics: Afro-Caribbean Sounds and Resonating Futures in the Works of David Hernandez and Pedro Pietri
This article explores the poetics of David Hernandez and Pedro Pietri, undisciplined poets who rejected imperialism, coloniality, and capitalist imperatives. Instead, they celebrated Afro-Boricua and Caribbean sounds in Chicago and New York. They draw inspiration from Afro-Caribbean music gatherings to craft unruly poetics emphasizing pleasure, physical closeness, and transformative power. In this piece, we propose a material and social manner of reading/listening to poetry, challenging aesthetics, and singular artistic control: outness. We look at Hernandez's 1981 performance of\"1951: Puerto Rico\" and how it exemplifies a break from Western musical conventions through improvised descargas. Additionally, we examine the influence of technology, particularly the telephone, on their poetics, highlighting the symbiotic relationship between embodied sounding and listening. Lastly, we delve into Pietri's poem \"Out of Focus Nuyoricans\" and his collaboration with visual artist ADAL to illustrate the critical poetics of futurity and the reclamation of margins. Hernandez and Pietri's work challenge traditional notions of poetry and communication by embracing outness and exploring Afro-Caribbean sounds. [Keywords: Out poetics, decolonial poetics, Rican poets, Afro-Caribbean sounds, Afro-Indigenous futurism, recording technologies, relational experimental aesthetics]
Journal Article
Semiotic staging of the ideological point of view in Amiri Baraka's Slave Ship: A social-semiotic approach
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.
Journal Article
“The Proprioceptive Probe”: Amiri Baraka’s New Ark in Tales and Tales of the Out and the Gone
Amiri Baraka reimagines his hometown, Newark, as a mythical New Ark in his fiction, Tales (1967) and the Tales of the Out and the Gone (2007), as a symbolic source wherefrom Black people reinvent themselves. At the basis of the poet’s spatial vision lies a culturally specific proprioceptive impulse, an attention to the real-time and site-specific innerworkings of the body. This essay analyzes the development of the sketchy characters and settings in the early stories into the New Ark’s “out and gone” in later stories within the framework of the proprioceptive loop that constantly internalizes and acts on the external.
Journal Article
