Description
Book SynopsisAmiri 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.
Trade Review“Once again, with
Brick City Vanguard, James Smethurst proves that he is one of the leading scholars of the Black Arts Movement, of New Left literary studies, and of one of its emblematic writers, Amiri Baraka.”- Jean-Philippe Marcoux, cofounder of the Amiri Baraka Society and author of
Jazz Griots: Music as History in the 1960s African American Poem;
“James Smethurst has read everything on Baraka and produced an original and important book.
Brick City Vanguard is a major contribution to the field.”- William J. Harris, author of
The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic;
“An illuminating work about a central figure in the Black Arts Movement.”-
CHOICE.
Table of Contents
- Introduction: The Brick City Vanguard
- Chapter One: ""That's Where Sarah Vaughn Lives"": Amiri Baraka, Newark, and the Landscape and Soundscape of Black Modernity
- Chapter Two: ""Formal Renditions"": Revisiting the Baraka-Ellison Debate
- Chapter Three: ""A Marching Song for Some Strange Uncharted Country"": The Black Future and Amiri Baraka's Liner Notes
- Chapter Four: ""Soul and Madness"": Baraka's Recorded Music and Poetry from Bohemia to Black Arts
- Chapter Five: ""I See Him Sometimes"": William Parker Reimagines and Amiri Baraka Glosses Curtis Mayfield
- Conclusion: Blues People at Symphony Hall
