Blues People: Amiri Baraka as Social Theorist

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Now 60 years.

2 Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: William Morrow, 1963), ix. Emphasis in original.

3 Ibid. Emphasis in original.

4 Ibid., ix–x.

5 Ibid, x. Emphasis in original.

6 Ibid., xi.

7 Ibid., xii.

8 Melville Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1941).

9 Andrew Apter, “Herkovits’s Heritage: Rethinking Syncretism in the African Diaspora,” Diaspora 1, no. 3 (1991): 235–60.

10 Baraka, Blues People, 42.

11 Ibid., 9.

12 Ibid., 50–1.

13 Ibid., 86–7.

14 Ibid., 55.

15 Ibid., 59.

16 Ibid., xii.

17 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), p. 49.

18 Baraka, Blues People, 123.

19 Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage, 1964), 252.

20 It is important to note that in other essays, notably those on jazz, Ellison takes a position on the role of societal racism that is closer to Baraka’s. See “On Bird, Bird-Watching, and Jazz” and “The Golden Age, Time Past,” in Ellison, Shadow and Act, pp. 199–212 and pp. 221–32.

21 Ellison, Shadow and Act, 253.

22 Ibid.

23 Baraka, Blues People, 83.

24 Ibid., 86.

25 Ibid., 188. Emphasis in original.

26 Ibid., 149.

27 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 100.

28 Baraka, Blues People, 231.

29 Ibid., 201.

30 Ibid., 200.

31 Hegel’s concept of world historical persons and events linked them to establishing freedom of the human spirit. His thinking on the subject did not include Africans or Blackness. Daniel Little, in “Philosophy of History,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2020 edition), 21, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/history/#HegHis See also Rocío Zambrana, “Hegel, History and Race,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race, ed. Amy Zack, 251–60, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

32 For a longer discussion of the ways in which African American thought foreshadowed later debates in cultural studies, poststructuralism, and anthropology see Ingrid Monson, Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 19–22.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ingrid Monson

Ingrid Monson is Quincy Jones Professor of African American Music at Harvard University. She is the author of Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa (2007), Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (1996) and an edited a volume entitled the African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective (2000). Her essays have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Daedalus, Black Music Research Journal, and many edited volumes.