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Abstract
This article explores Amiri Baraka’s significant contributions to the field of black internationalism. Through an analysis of his own poetry and performance, this essay demonstrates how his cultural practices and political activism were instrumental not only in developing black international consciousness but also in mobilizing local political power. His cultural work exhibited a domestic Pan-Africanism that centered black transnational concerns within the arenas of national U.S. politics and the local domestic politics of his hometown of Newark, New Jersey. By focusing on the changing same of his esthetic method, this article examines the consistent staging of what I call a black transnational esthetic, an institutionalized theory and praxis that pervaded his cultural and political work. Baraka’s esthetic, a comprehensive multimodal approach at once musical, literary, political, performative, and institutional, served as a sonic re-articulation of the radical possibility of organized black international social and political thought and activism.
Notes
1 Werner Sollors, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a Populist Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978). Aldon Nielson, Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Jessica E. Teague, “Black Sonic Space and the Stereophonic Poetics of Amiri Baraka’s It’s Nation Time,” Sound Studies 1, no. 1 (2015): 22–39. Kathy Lou Schultz, The Afro-Modernist Epic and Literary History: Tolson, Hughes, Baraka (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
2 Nathaniel Mackey, “The Changing Same: Black Music in the Poetry of Amiri Baraka,” Boundary 2 6, no. 2 (1978): 355–86.
3 Ibid., 366.
4 Kimberly W. Benston, Baraka: The Renegade Behind the Mask (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). Meta DuEwa Jones, “Politics, Process, & (Jazz) Performance: Amiri Baraka’s ‘It’s Nation Time,’ African American Review 37, no. 2-3 (2003): 245–52.
5 William Harris, The Jazz Aesthetic: The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985), 13.
6 William Harris, “‘How You Sound??’: Amiri Baraka Writes Free Jazz,” in Uptown Conversations: The New Jazz Studies, ed. Robert G. O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
7 James Smethurst, Brick City Vanguard: Amiri Baraka, Black Music, Black Modernity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), 200.
8 Cedric Johnson, From Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Michael Simanga, Amiri Baraka and the Congress of African People (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Russell Rickford, We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
9 Komozi Woodard, A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) & Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 59.
10 Ibid., 66.
11 Robeson Taj Frazier, “The Congress of African People: Baraka, Brother Mao, and the Year of ‘74’,” in The New Black History: Revisiting the Second Reconstruction, ed. Manning Marable and Elizabeth Kai Hinton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 135–53.
12 Ibid, 137.
13 Robin D.G. Kelley and Betsy Esch, “Black Like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution,” Souls 1, no. 4 (1999): 6–41. Kelley and Esch argue that “more than any other Maoist or antirevisionist, Baraka and the RCL epitomized the most conscious and sustained effort to bring the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution to the inner cities of the U.S. and to transform it in a manner that spoke to the black working class.”
14 Michelle Ann Stephens, Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914-1962 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 5.
15 Ibid., 12.
16 Ibid., 11.
17 Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1997), 158.
18 LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). Home: Social Essays (New York: William Morrow, 1966), 21.
19 Cynthia Young. Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 144–7.
20 Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press), 227.
21 LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Home: Social Essays (New York: Morrow, 1966), 85.
22 Ibid.
23 W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Color Line Belts the World” (Collier’s Weekly, 1906), 28, quoted in Robin D.G. Kelley, “But a Local Phase of a World Problem: Black History’s Global Vision 1883-1950,” The Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (1999): 1045–77.
24 LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: William Morrow, 1963), 153 (emphasis added).
25 LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Black Music (New York: William Morrow, 1967), 180. The naming of this concept as “The Changing Same” did not occur until this publication. The 28th and final chapter of this work is entitled “1966—The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music).”
26 Ibid., 30.
27 Jones (Baraka), Blues People, 212.
28 Arnold Shaw, The Jazz Age: Popular Music in the 1920s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 154–9.
29 Jones, Black Music, 79.
30 Kathy Ogren, The Jazz Revolution: Twenties America and the Meaning of Jazz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 88.
31 Jones (Baraka), Blues People, 181.
32 Ibid., 181, 194.
33 Ibid., 188.
34 LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), The Dead Lecturer (New York: Grove Press, 1964), 64.
35 Jones (Baraka), Black Music, 176.
36 Anaïs Duplan, “How to Find Your Self (and How to Kill It): A Conversation with Suzi Analogue and Nathaniel Mackey on Black Music,” Ploughshares (blog), October 6, 2016, blog.pshares.org/index.php/how-to-find-your-self-and-how-to-kill-it-a-conversation-with-suzi-analogue-and-nathaniel-mackey-on-black-music/ (accessed June 27, 2018).
37 Ibid.
38 Benston, Performing Blackness, 220.
39 Stephens, Black Empire, 14.
40 Ibid., 20.
41 Ibid., 99.
42 Stephens, Black Empire, 112.
43 Robin J. Hayes, “A Free Black Mind Is a Concealed Weapon: Institutions and Social Movements in the African Diaspora,” in Transnational Blackness: Navigating the Global Color Line, ed. Manning Marable and Vanessa Agard-Jones (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 175–87.
44 See notes 1 and 2 above.
45 Johnson, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders, 71.
46 LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Black Magic: Collected Poetry, 1961-1967 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), 115.
47 “SOS,” Black Newark, April 1968, 6.
48 Imamu Amiri Baraka, “Black Nationalism: 1972” The Black Scholar 4, no. 1 (1972): 23–29.
49 Michael Simanga, Amiri Baraka and the Congress of African People (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 88.
50 Amiri Baraka, “The Pan-Afrikan Party and the Black Nation,” 9. The Black Power Movement: Part 1, Amiri Baraka from Black Arts to Black Radicalism (microform) Editorial advisor Komozi Woodard, project coordinator Randolph H. Boehm (Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 2000), reel 2, fiche 580.
51 Amiri Baraka, Raise Race Rays Raze: Essays Since 1965 (New York: Random House, 1969), 133–34. The seven principles in Swahili (Nguzo Saba) are 1) unity (umoja), 2) self-determination (kujichagulia), 3) collective work and responsibility (ujima), 4) cooperative economics (ujamaa), 5) purpose (nia), 6) creativity (kuumba), and 7) faith (imani). Baraka explains that Kawaida represented “Black ideology in toto. A path to Blackness and Nationhood…the central ingredient of the new Nationalist organization.”
52 Simanga, Congress of African People, 80
53 Ibid., 81.
54 Ibid., 82.
55 Baraka, Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, 425
56 Amiri Baraka, “Black Nationalism: 1972,” The Black Scholar 4, no. 1 (1972): 23.
57 Woodard, Nation within a Nation, 224.
58 “We Must Mobilize,” Black NewArk, April 1972, 3.
59 Ibid.
60 “Together We Will Win,” Black NewArk, April 1972, 3.
61 Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, 417.
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid., 427
64 “The New Birth In Concert,” Unity and Struggle, February-March 1974, 6.
65 “Nationalist Aspects of National Liberation,” Unity and Struggle, February-March 1974, 12.
66 Frazier, “Congress of African People,” 146.
67 “CAP: Going Through Changes,” Unity and Struggle, October 1, 1974, 1.
68 “A Summation and A Beginning: From Congress of Afrikan People to Revolutionary Communist League (M-L-M),” Unity and Struggle, June 1976, 1.
69 Frazier, “Congress of African People,” 149.
70 Ibid.
71 Amiri Baraka, “The Wailer,” Callaloo 23, Larry Neal: A Special Issue (1985): 248–56.
72 Ibid., 255.
73 Ibid., 256.
74 Ibid.
75 Kelley and Esch, “Black like Mao,” 30.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Peter Clavin
Peter Clavin is an instructor of American Studies, English, and History in New Jersey. He graduated from the University at Buffalo-SUNY in June 2019, and his dissertation explores the politics and pedagogy of Amiri Baraka’s lifelong activism. He is currently working on turning his dissertation into a book. He is interested in the cultural politics of jazz and hip hop performance in relation to movements for social justice from the Black Arts Movement to Black Lives Matter. His teaching interests are concerned with the spatial politics of (under)development, carceral studies, and the intersections of race, class, and gender within transnational popular culture.