Overview

Amiri 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.

Full Product Details

9781625345141

Table of Contents

Reviews

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

Author Information

James Smethurst is professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available