Amiri Baraka is one of the most prolific African American writers of the 20th century. He is an acclaimed poet and the Obie-winning playwright of Dutchman. His long list of writing credits includes: Blues People; Home; Social Essays; Black Fire; Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones and Selected Plays and Prose of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones. He continues to be active in the struggle against racism and capitalism, to organize artists, and to participate in the struggle for Black Liberation.
Below is a 10 minute mini-documentary video and photos of the exhibit: Amiri Baraka Evolution of a Revolutionary Poet hosted by Zambezi Bazaar in Leimert Park, Los Angeles, CA taken in June of 2008.
Digging:
The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music
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Hardcover: 436 pages
Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (May 26, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0520257154
ISBN-13: 978-0520257153
Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.4 x 1.5 inches
For almost half a century, Amiri Baraka
has ranked among the most important commentators on African American
music and culture. In this brilliant assemblage of his writings on
music, the first such collection in nearly twenty years, Baraka blends
autobiography, history, musical analysis, and political commentary to
recall the sounds, people, times, and places he's encountered. As in his
earlier classics,Blues
People and Black Music, Baraka
offers essays on the famous--Max Roach, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis,
John Coltrane--and on those whose names are known mainly by jazz
aficionados--Alan Shorter, Jon Jang, and Malachi Thompson. Baraka's
literary style, with its deep roots in poetry, makes palpable his love
and respect for his jazz musician friends. His energy and enthusiasm
show us again how much Coltrane, Albert Ayler, and the others he
lovingly considers mattered. He brings home to us how music itself
matters, and how musicians carry and extend that knowledge from
generation to generation, providing us, their listeners, with a sense of
meaning and belonging.
From the Inside Flap
"As a commentator on American music, and African American music in
particular, Baraka occupies a unique niche. His intelligence, critical
sense, passion, strong political stances, involvement with musicians and
in the musical world, as well as in his community, give his work a
quality unlike any other. As a reviewer and as someone inside the
movement, he writes powerfully about music as few others can or
do."--Steven L. Isoardi, author of Central
Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles
"Every jazz musician who has endured beyond changing fashions and
warring cultures has had a signature sound. Amiri Baraka--from the very
beginning of his challenging, fiery presence on the jazz scene--has
brought probing light, between his off-putting thunderclaps, on what is
indeed America's classical music. I sometimes disagree insistently with
Amiri, and it's mutual; but when he gets past his parochial
pyrotechnics, as in choruses in this book, he brings you into the life
force of this music."--Nat Hentoff, author of The
Jazz Life
Black Fire: An Anthology of
Afro-American Writing
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Editors: Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal
ISBN 13: 978-1-57478-039-0
677 pp., $24.95
First published: 1968; Black Classic published date: 2006
While many texts are readily available chronicling the Black Power Movement, the
same cannot be said for its 'aesthetic and spiritual sister,' the Black Arts
Movement. Black Fire is a rare exception that documents and captures the social
and cultural turmoil of the period.
Amiri Baraka and
Larry Neal, co-editors and
contributors to this volume, saw Black Fire as a manifesto to bring about change
in Black thought and action, generated from a Black aesthetic. Often considered
the seminal work from the Black Arts Movement, Black Fire is a rich anthology
and an extraordinary source document, presenting 178 selections of poetry,
essays, short stories and plays from cultural critics, literary artists and
political leaders. Many of the contributors became prominent, nationally and
internationally. Others receded into the cultural landscape, even before Black
Fire's first publication in 1968. Included in this groundbreaking volume are
essays by John Henrik Clarke,
Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), Harold Cruse, and A.B. Spellman; poetry by
Askia Toure, Sonia Sanchez,
Gaston Neal, Stanley Crouch, Calvin C. Hernton, and surprisingly Sun-Ra; fiction
by Julia Fields and drama from Ed Bullins. Sixty-three additional contributors
round out this comprehensive work.
Excerpt
These are the wizards, the bards, the babalawo, the shaiks, of Weusi Mchoro. These descriptions will be carried for the next thousand years
We are being good. We are the beings of goodness, again. We will be righteous and our creations good and strong and righteous, and teaching. The teaching and the descriptions. The will and the strength. Songs, chants, bad sh*t goin down, rendered as the light beam of God warms your hearts forever. Forget, and reget. Reget and forget. Where it was. This is the source, Kitab Sudan. The black man's comfort and guide. Where we was we will be agin. Tho the map be broke and thorny tho the wimmens sell they men, then cry up hell to get them back our here agin. In the middle of my life, In the middle of our dreams. The black artist. The black man. The holy holy black man. The man you seek. The climber the striver. The maker of peace. The lover. The warrior. We are they whom you seek. Look in. Find yr self. Find the being, the speaker. The voice, the back dust hover in your soft eyeclosings. Is you. Is the creator. Is nothing. Plus or minus, you vehicle! We are presenting. Your various selves. We are presenting from God, a tone, your own. Go on. Now.
Amiri Baraka (From the Foreword)
 Somebody
Blew Up America & Other PoemsClick to order via Amazon
ISBN: 0913441619 |
ISBN: 0913441600 |
The Essence of Reparations is Baraka's first collection of four daring essays looking at reparations for African-Americans, for the crimes of slavery, linking reparations to greater political, economic and social development, and the writer's ideas about democratic transformation in the USA.
The fact that reparations could be the watershed movement for Black peoples in the 21st century and that scholars from Harvard to the University of the West Indies (UWI) and from Haiti to Nigeria are exploring, among other features, the moral and legal issues like never before, will not endear Baraka any more to his detractors who are still up in arms about his explosive poem 'Somebody Blew Up America.
In fact, the jointly-published Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems headlines the 9-11 poem in which Baraka questions 'who,' other than those identified as terrorists, knew beforehand about the New York City World Trade bombings on September 11, 2001.
The poetic inquiry detonated a fiery storm of its own, leading to a battle royal with the very governor of New Jersey, Baraka's native state, which had not long before appointed him as its poet laureate. The government asked Baraka to resign over the poem that mattered.
The poet refused. And a few months ago the New Jersey state legislature practically outlawed the laureate post. Baraka has since taken the state government to court and Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems may very well end up as 'witness' for the plaintiff and the defense.
Baraka, 69 (b. 1934], has written over 40 books of poetry, plays and music history and criticism. His works have been translated all over Europe and he remains renown as the father of the Black Arts movement in the USA in the 1960s.
Author and Bob Marley scholar Kwame Dawes states in his rather comprehensive introduction to Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems that one thing is for sure: Baraka needs no introduction.
Yet House of Nehesi sees these two books also as an introduction of Amiri Baraka to the Caribbean, said its projects director Lasana M. Sekou. It could very well be the first time that a major US author has been published in the region.
Equally world renown author/poet/historian Kamau Brathwaite at NYU credits Baraka as one of the few American authors to feature the Caribbean critically in their works and is certain about the place and appearance of Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems as, "one more mark in the development in modern Black radical & revolutionary cultural reconstruction."
Already available at www.amazon.com, www.spdbooks.org and other online bookstores, it can be argued that there is no way either of these new titles will only be read in the Caribbean given the US and international reach of Baraka's work.
Take the complexity of his position in The Essence of Reparations, 'One does not have to agree with his ideological framework to appreciate the timeliness and urgency of his case for reparations,' states Dr. Rupert Lewis, professor of Political Thought at UWI. And in the book's introduction, a virtual international reparations reportage, former Nigerian diplomatic officer Fabian Badejo pointed out that Baraka is basing the struggle for reparations 'on facts, in a scientific manner.'
It has been said that Baraka is committed to social justice like no other American author. He is certainly a revolutionary thinker whose political activities and creative growth has taken him from Black nationalism in the 1960s to Marxism-Leninism'without ever turning his literature into dogma or being an apologist for any movement or ideology.
In The Essence of Reparations and Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems www.houseofnehesipublish.com the indomitable American who dares to challenge the times is once again fresh and fearless.
They say its some terrorist,
some barbaric
A Rab,
in Afghanistan
It wasn't our American terrorists
It wasn't the Klan or the Skin heads
Or the them that blows up nigger
Churches, or reincarnates us on Death Row
It wasn't Trent Lott
Or David Duke or Giuliani
Or Schundler, Helms retiring
'excerpt from the poem Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems by Amiri Baraka
Blues
People: Negro Music in White America
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Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Harper Perennial; 1 edition (January 20, 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 068818474X
"The path the slave took to 'citizenship' is what I want to look at. And I make my analogy through the slave citizen's music -- through the music that is most closely associated with him: blues and a later, but parallel development, jazz... [If] the Negro represents, or is symbolic of, something in and about the nature of American culture, this certainly should be revealed by his characteristic music."
So says Amiri Baraka in the Introduction to Blues People, his classic work on the place of jazz and blues in American social, musical, economic, and cultural history. From the music of African slaves in the United States through the music scene of the 1960's, Baraka traces the influence of what he calls "negro music" on white America -- not only in the context of music and pop culture but also in terms of the values and perspectives passed on through the music. In tracing the music, he brilliantly illuminates the influence of African Americans on American culture and history.
Transbluesency:
The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/Leroi Jones (1961-1995)
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Hardcover: 271 pages
Publisher: Marsilio Publishers (October 1995)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1568860137
The poems selected here span from Baraka's first collection,
Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961), to the long poem
Wise, Why's, Y'z, published earlier this year [1995]. The best
work here has been culled from his second and third books, The
Dead Lecturer (1964) and Black Magic (1969). Despite coming out
of distinct phases in Baraka's life (the former when he was a
book Beat, by the latter he'd become black nationalist), these
works combine the personal and political in highly charged ways.
When Baraka writes of "the roaring harmonies of need" or of
"stumbling over our souls in the dark, for the sake of unnatural
advantage," he succeeds as both an activist and a poet. However,
as revolutionary politics increasingly intrude, Baraka seems
largely to abandon the craft of poetry for the the broader
strokes of diatribe and rant ("dont tell me shit about the
tradition of slavemasters/ & henry james... "). However
disappointing much of this later work may be, it is readily
argued that Baraka's influential work prefigured rap and the
current vogue of spoken-word performances and poetry slams. This
collection provides a useful overview of his work.
'Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Tales
of the Out & the Gone
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Paperback: 221 pages
Publisher: Akashic Books (December 1, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1933354127
In his signature politically piercing and poetic staccato
style, Baraka offers a perspective on social and political
changes and a fresh view of the possibilities that language
presents in exploring human passions. The first part of this
collection of short stories focuses on politics of the 1970s and
1980s, when economic prospects were so bleak that muggers were
mugging muggers, black mayors replaced white mayors with very
little else changing, and revolutionaries were severely
compromised. In the second part, Baraka offers pieces from the
late 1980s through the current day, again spotting hypocrisy on
all fronts and exhibiting the joy of language and
self-expression and an abiding appreciation for a well-told
tale. Baraka is a keen observer of the outlandish and outrageous
in politics and human behavior. Fans and newcomers alike will
appreciate Baraka's breadth of political perspective and passion
for storytelling. Vanessa Bush
'Copyright ' American Library Association. All rights
reserved
Home:
Social Essays
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Paperback: 252 pages
Publisher: Ecco Pr; 1 edition (February 1998)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0880015721
"No study of the Black Revolt of the 60s is complete w/o
Home, written by one of the founders of the Black Arts
Movement."
'Dr. Komozi Woodar
Black
Music
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Paperback: 224 pages
Publisher: Da Capo Press; 1st Da Capo Press ed edition (March
21, 1998)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0306808145
This scintillating collection by Amiri Imamu Baraka, published in 1968 under his birth name Leroi Jones, covers a wide range of jazz writings from 1959 to 1967. Baraka's engaging and prophetic portraits of Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter, Bobby Bradford, Cecil Taylor, Thelonious Monk, Roy Haynes, Don Cherry, and John Coltrane (whom he called "the heaviest spirit") beam with an electric and fluid language that mirrors those artists' speed-of-light improvisations. In "Jazz and the White Critic," which blasts white critics who judge jazz by European, rather than African American, standards, Jones wrote, "As Western people, the sociocultural thinking of 18th-century Europe comes to us as history and legacy that is a continuous and organic part of the 20th-century West. The sociocultural philosophy of the Negro in America ... is no less specific and no less important for any intelligent critical speculation about the music that came out of it." His analysis of the burgeoning avant-garde scene in "Apple Cores #1-6," "New York Loft and Coffee Shop Jazz," and "The Jazz Avant-Garde" accurately depicts the artistic promise and peril of that period in the words of a literary genius who was there and helped create it. 'Eugene Holley Jr. (Amazon.com)
The
LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader
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Paperback: 560 pages
Publisher: Basic Books; Second Edition edition (November 21,
1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1560252383
Baraka is a writer who readily embraces change, and this collection reflects a life full of changes beginning with something as fundamental as a change in name. The selections included are arranged chronologically in four distinct periods: The Beat Period (1957-62), The Transitional Period (1963-65), The Black Nationalist Period (1965-74), and The Third World Marxist Period (1974-present). Editor Harris, in collaboration with Baraka, has chosen representative examples of Baraka's poems, plays, jazz writings, and social criticism. Among several new works are a eulogy for James Baldwin and an emotional analysis of Jesse Jackson's role in Democratic politics. Essential for all literature collections. 'William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The
Dutchman & The Slave (two plays)
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Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 0688210848
Publication Date: January 01,
1971
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Centered squarely on the Negro-white conflict, both Dutchman and The Slave are literally shocking plays--in ideas, in language, in honest anger. They illuminate as with a flash of lightning a deadly serious problem--and they bring an eloquent and exceptionally powerful voice to the American theatre.
Dutchman opened in New York City on March 24, 1964, to perhaps the most excited acclaim ever accorded an off-Broadway production and shortly thereafter received the Village Voice's Obie Award. The Slave, which was produced off-Broadway the following fall, continues to be the subject of heated critical controversy.
Eulogies
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Binding: Hardcover
ISBN: 1568860072
Number Of Pages: 225
Publisher: Marsilio Publishers
Date Published: June 1996
This compilation of more than 30 years' worth of elegiac prose and oratory by dramatist, poet, and commentator Amiri Baraka is dedicated to such figures as James Baldwin, Miles Davis, Kimako Baraka, and Dizzy Gillespie, as well as other inspiring African-American, community activists, musicians, artists, and citizens. Always eloquent, heartfelt, and purposeful, this collection exalts and honors great lives, and preserves the contributions of elders as living spirits to encourage and inspire.
Daggers
and Javelins: Essays, 1974-1979
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Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 0688034322
Number Of Pages: 334
Publisher: William Morrow & Company
"The essays and lectures collected in Daggers and Javelins:
Essays, 1974-1979 represent Amiri Baraka's vigorous attempt to
identify an African American revolutionary tradition that could
parallel anticolonial struggles in Third World countries of
Africa, Asia, and South America. Baraka applies a Marxist
analysis to African American literature in these essays.
Having become disappointed with the progress of the Black Power
movement and its emphasis on grassroots electoral politics,
Baraka came to Marxism with the zeal of a new convert. 'The
essays of the earliest part of this period,' he writes, 'are
overwhelmingly political in the most overt sense.' While some of
the essays in Daggers and Javelins address jazz, film, and
writers of the Harlem Renaissance, all of them do so with the
purpose of assessing what Baraka calls their potential to
contribute to a revolutionary struggle." ' Source:
http://www.enotes.com/daggers-javelins-salem/daggers-javelins
The
Autobiography of LeRoi Jones
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Paperback
Publisher: Lawrence Hill & Co (March 1995)
ISBN-10: 0881910228
ISBN-13: 978-0881910223
First published in 1984, this is a revised edition of The Autobiography of Leroi Jones, which includes the original text (restored by the author) as well as a new introduction. Born Leroi Jones in 1934--he became Amiri Baraka in the mid-1960s---he is one of the seminal figures of contemporary black writing, a poet, playwright, novelist, critic, and political activist. Even more than those labels indicate, however, Baraka has been at the heart of literary and ideological ferment since the 1950s. Early in his career, he was strongly influenced by the Beats. During the cultural upheaval of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, he moved uptown to Harlem, changed his name, and embraced a religion that was a hybrid of Islam and traditional African principles. And then, in the 1970s, Baraka turned his back on Black Nationalism and embraced Marxist Leninism. The autobiography, written in Baraka's inimitable style, one that we might call word-jazz, ends there. 'This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Last
Poets on a Mission: Selected Poetry & a History of the Last Poets
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Author: Abiodun Oyewole, Umar Hassan, Amiri
Baraka (foreword)
Publisher: Henry Holt & Co., Inc.
Date Published: September 1996
Format: Trade Paper
The Last Poets were born on May 19, 1968, at a birthday celebration for Malcolm X, and became the revolutionary force for many African Americans, expressing the plight of black people in their music. In nearly 50 poems, their lyrics advocate revolution through economic empowerment, self-love, personal growth and spiritual kinship. Through it all, The Last Poets have successfully managed to create light with words, power with music and substance with soul. Photos.
Related Links
Amiri Baraka Table from ChickenBones: A Journal for Literary & Artistic African-American Themes
The
Essence of Reparations