Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual available in Hardcover, eBook
Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual
- ISBN-10:
- 0814793738
- ISBN-13:
- 9780814793732
- Pub. Date:
- 08/01/2001
- Publisher:
- New York University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0814793738
- ISBN-13:
- 9780814793732
- Pub. Date:
- 08/01/2001
- Publisher:
- New York University Press
Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual
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Overview
In this groundbreaking and comprehensive study, the first to interweave Baraka's art and political activities, Jerry Watts takes us from his early immersion in the New York scene through the most dynamic period in the life and work of this controversial figure. Watts situates Baraka within the various worlds through which he travelled including Beat Bohemia, Marxist-Leninism, and Black Nationalism. In the process, he convincingly demonstrates how the 25 years between Baraka's emergence in 1960 and his continued influence in the mid-1980s can also be read as a general commentary on the condition of black intellectuals during the same time. Continually using Baraka as the focal point for a broader analysis, Watts illustrates the link between Baraka's life and the lives of other black writers trying to realize their artistic ambitions, and contrasts him with other key political intellectuals of the time. In a chapter sure to prove controversial, Watts links Baraka's famous misogyny to an attempt to bury his own homosexual past.
A work of extraordinary breadth, Amira Baraka is a powerful portrait of one man's lifework and the pivotal time it represents in African-American history. Informed by a wealth of original research, it fills a crucial gap in the lively literature on black thought and history and will continue to be a touchstone work for some time to come.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780814793732 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | New York University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2001 |
| Pages: | 592 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.44(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Birth of an Intellectual Journey
AMIRI BARAKA, THE former LeRoi Jones, was born Everett LeRoy Jonesin Newark, New Jersey, on October 7, 1934. The son of Coyette ("Coyt")LeRoy Jones, a postal supervisor, and Anna Lois Russ Jones, a social worker,LeRoy was raised in a stable lower-middle-class, upper-working-class blackfamily. Even though his family aspired to the bourgeoisie, Jones was fundamentallyshaped throughout his early years by a rather typical Americanlower-middle-class socialization, with one qualification: He was born andraised black in a significantly racist society. In describing his religious upbringing,Jones provided a glimpse of the black, lower-middle-class world ofhis youth:
My own church in Newark, New Jersey, a Baptist church, has almost no resemblance to the older more traditional Negro Christian churches. The music, for instance, is usually limited to the less emotional white church music, and the choir usually sings Bach or Handel during Christmas and Easter. In response to some of its older "country" members, the church, which was headed by a minister who is the most respected Negro in Newark, has to import gospel groups or singers having a more traditional "Negro" church sound.
Despite the limited musical offerings of his status-conscious church, Joneswas undoubtedly exposed to robust, "traditional Negro" secular music. TheNewark of Jones's early years was a hub of black night life. In Swing City, authorBarbara Kukla claims that between 1925 and 1950, Newark was a "thrivingmeccaof entertainment." A center for jazz, musicians going into and outof New York City performed regularly in Newark. One testimony to this vibrantblack musical culture was a black girl born in Newark in 1924 who performedin local night clubs before professionally emerging on the nationalscene as "the Divine One," Sarah Vaughan. Certainly, the young Jones musthave been exposed to some aspects of this rich musical tradition. Perhaps hislove of black music dated from these earliest encounters.
For much, if not most, of LeRoy's youth, the Jones family resided eitherin black neighborhoods located on the fringe of Italian American neighborhoodsor in black enclaves in Italian American neighborhoods. Jones attendedpredominantly white public schools. When recalling his days at theMcKinley and Barringer Schools, Baraka mentions that he was not preparedfor the racism there, and he responded to being called nigger by learning cursewords in Italian. His outsider status led to the development of a split life betweenthe black playground worlds of his buddies and the hostile white surroundingsof these schools. Concerning this dual existence, Baraka surmised,"It must be true, maybe obvious, that the schizophrenic tenor of some of mylife gets fielded from these initial sources."
After graduating from high school, Jones enrolled in the Newark branchof Rutgers University. He once again found himself in a predominantly whiteenvironment. In explaining his year-long stay at Rutgers, one biographerwrote, "The effort to prove himself in an 'essentially mediocre situation' andthe experience of always being an outsider in any school social activities madehim transfer to Howard University."
Howard University proved critical to the development of Baraka's ethnicallymarginal identity, for at Howard he was exposed to the world of theNegro elite, the authentic "black bourgeoisie." Long considered the "capstone"of Negro education, Howard University was the national centerpiecefor the education of the black bourgeoisie. Founded in 1866 by General OliverHoward (head of the Freedman's Bureau) to educate the former slaves,Howard University was, and continues to be, the best-funded, predominantlyblack center of higher education because of its direct subsidies from the federalgovernment. By the early twentieth century, Howard had become specificallyendowed with the mission of educating the black professional class.Through this university came a disproportionate share of the country's blacklawyers, doctors, dentists, ministers, teachers, social workers, and scholars.
Except for the sporadic intellectual exchanges in classes taught by SterlingBrown, Nathan Scott, and E. Franklin Frazier, Jones strongly dislikedHoward. He considered it anti-intellectual. Howard students appeared to bemore interested in acquiring the "proper" black bourgeois weltanschauungthan in obtaining a serious education. Jones was disgusted by what hethought to be Howard's educational philosophy. "The Howard thing let meunderstand the Negro sickness. They teach you to pretend to be white."Theodore Hudson, author of From LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka, mentionsJones's involvement in a "watermelon episode" that has almost become a legend.Though somewhat imaginary, the episode captured Jones's disenchantmentwith Howard and, more precisely, his disillusionment with the blackmiddle class. As the story goes, Jones and a buddy bought a watermelon andsat down to eat it on a bench in front of one of the college halls. Shortly thereafter,his buddy left to attend a class. Now sitting alone, Jones was approachedby a university administrator, the dean of men, who asked Jones just what hethought he was doing sitting outside a campus building eating watermelon.Jones claims to have nonchalantly answered that he was simply eating themelon, whereupon the insulted dean ordered Jones to discard it. Rather mischievously,Jones replied that he could chuck only his half of the melon for theother half belonged to his friend. According to Jones, the agitated dean's responsewas shocking: "Do you realize that you're sitting right in front of thehighway where white people can see you? Do you realize that this school is thecapstone of Negro higher education? Do you realize that you are compromisingthe Negro?"
Jones's story may have been apocryphal, for as Hudson discovered, severalkey details were incorrect. In any case, the story's facts are less importantthan its unstated premise. The story portrays Howard University as situatedin a victim-status ideology. Because the dean wanted black students toconvey to whites an image of themselves that was deserving of white acceptance,black students were not taught to innately value themselves. Instead, theproperly socialized bourgeois Howard student should internalize this "whitegaze" in his or her psyche. White persons did not have to be physically present.Jones realized that Howard's inability to redefine itself in a non-victim-statusmanner led to and reinforced a disrespect for the artistic expressionsand cultural artifacts of black folk culture, particularly those art forms thathad yet to acquire an acceptable status in white artistic and intellectual circles.More important, though, such attitudes embodied and/or reinforced a disrespectfor black people.
Jones recalled several other incidents at Howard that manifested the victim-statussyndrome. After a Howard student production of James Baldwin'splay The Amen Corner, a professor of English stated that the production ofthis play about the lives of poor blacks in a storefront church had "set thespeech department back ten years." On another occasion, upon being informedthat Sterling Brown and others wanted to sponsor a jazz concert, thedean of the music school told them that jazz would never be performed in theMusic and Art Building. Humorously, Baraka later noted, "When they finallydid let jazz in, it was Stan Kenton."
Concerning the victim status and Howard University, Jones wrote:
Howard University shocked me into realizing how desperately sick the Negro could be, how he could be led into self-destruction and how he would not realize that it was the society that had forced him into a great sickness. ... These are all examples of how American society convinces the Negro that he is inferior, and then he starts conducting his life that way.
Jones flunked out of Howard in 1954. This was no surprise, insofar asJones was never able to discipline himself academically. Not quite willing toembrace bourgeois black achievement norms yet sufficiently "Americanized"to value a college degree, Jones felt ambivalent during his Howard years. Thissense of personal anomie was compounded once outside the imposed constraintsof college life. Describing his lack of direction upon flunking out ofcollege, Jones observed:
I was completely unslung. Disconnected ... Like how could I flunk out of school, who had never had any problems in school? I was supposed to be some kind of prodigy.... I came back home but didn't go out. I had to do something. I didn't think I could be walking Newark's streets when I was supposed to be in school and I couldn't even explain it.
MILITARY LIFE: ESCAPING THE BOURGEOIS LOGIC
Baraka enlisted in the U.S. Air Force as a way of reimposing order in his life.The military, with its strong tradition of discipline, would provide Jones withthe externally imposed volition that he could not generate on his own. Militaryservice has historically functioned as an agent of discipline for manyyoung men and women and, as such, has often been seen as a socializingmechanism for upward mobility. But Jones was not seeking upward mobility;he had entered the military after having failed at upward mobility. Evidentlyhe perceived the disciplined life of the military as a negation of the undisciplinedlife of the black bourgeoisie. It was no accident that in later life whenJones attempted to fashion a revolutionary posture, he did so by adapting ahighly ordered, paramilitary lifestyle.
Jones claimed that he left Howard because he was repulsed by the anti-intellectualethos of the black bourgeoisie. He referred to Howard as an "employment:agency," implying that it was in the business of training people forthe workforce, as opposed to educating them. But Jones did not leaveHoward radicalized. To what extent was he authentically alienated from bourgeoisblack life when he left Howard? It is hard to imagine a self-proclaimedradical student or an estranged college dropout seeking haven in the U.S. AirForce, unless the alienation stemmed less from opposition to the broaderAmerican social order than from not succeeding in it. Jones was obviously atodds with his bourgeois aspirations, but this rejection of bourgeois black societydid not necessarily extend to bourgeois white America. Several yearslater, when he became disaffected from white "middle America" (as embodiedin the military), it was not surprising that this alienation lacked an explicitpolitical content. He emerged then as a Beat poet. However, when Jones enteredmilitary service after having flunked out of college, he was a young manexperiencing the pangs of status dislocation.
Baraka has interpreted his days in the air force as his introduction to thesickness of white America. Howard University, he claims, had exposed himonly to the sickness of black America.
When I went into the Army it shocked me into realizing the hysterical sickness of the oppressors and the suffering of my own people. When I went into the Army I saw how the oppressors suffered by virtue of their oppressions—by having to oppress, by having to make believe that the weird, hopeless fantasy that they had about the world was actually true. They actually do believe that. And this weight is something that deforms them and finally, makes them even more hopeless than lost black men.
While in the air force, or "error farce" as he called it, Jones began toconsider seriously the realm of ideas. No longer subjected to lists of disaffiliatedrequired readings as he had been in the university, Jones for the firsttime in his adult life let his inquisitiveness dictate his reading matter. Althoughthis inevitably made for eclectic reading, the variety of texts nourishedhis curiosity.
In his autobiography, Baraka describes a trip to Chicago while on weekendleave from the air force. While walking near the University of Chicago, hewent into a bookstore and saw books there that grabbed his attention, includingsome that he had read before. He recognized Portrait of the Artist as aYoung Man but was fascinated by the eccentric opening lines of Joyce'sUlysses, "Stately plump Buck Mulligan." Unsure at that moment just what washappening to him, he was aware, however, that he was in the midst of a cataclysmicoccasion.
I suddenly understood that I didn't know a hell of a lot about anything. What it was that seemed to me then was that learning was important. I'd never thought that before. The employment agency I'd last gone to college at, the employment agency approach of most schools I guess, does not emphasize the beauties, the absolute joy of learning.... I vowed, right then, to learn something new everyday.... That's what I would do. Not just as a pastime, something to do in the service, but as a life commitment.... I needed to learn. I wanted to study. But I wanted to learn and study stuff I wanted to learn and study. Serious, uncommon, weird stuff! At that moment my life was changed.
Once shielded from the "education-as-a-means-of-upward mobility"ethos and its powerful reinforcements in the broader social order and blacksubculture (i.e., careerism, economic self-sufficiency, church, family), Jonesbecame freer to engage in "impractical" tasks such as reading poetry and writingessays. But Jones was not completely free to become an intellectual, for hestill held to some of those social beliefs defining a successful life as the acquisitionof economic and social status.
The influence of the military on Baraka's intellectual developmentcannot be overstated. Insofar as his military service seemingly placed himin a bounded social strata, suspended in time and divorced from the moresand mobility norms of mainstream society, it provided Jones with a necessarysocial space in which he could pursue intellectual interests withoutconcern for their utility. That is, the military functioned as a social marginalityfacilitator for the young Baraka. Not seeking to make a career in themilitary, Baraka's enlistment in the air force as a lowly private after threeyears of college must be considered, according to middle-class norms, as adeliberate effort at downward mobility. Jones's enlistment was the secondindication that he was guided by norms different from those expected ofhim. His rejection of the bourgeois achievement norms that ultimately resultedin his forced departure from Howard was followed by a social marginalityfacilitator, military life, that shielded him from the logic of blackbourgeois, social-status acquisition.
Like most black intellectuals, Jones could not write about an early childhoodspent in intense study, as described in Sartre's The Words or as chronicledin Flaubert's letters. Most blacks have entered the intellectual life throughemotionally uprooting acts of commitment undertaken at a mature agerather than through the seemingly natural progression of individuals nurturedfrom the crib on poetry, classical music, and belles lettres. This manifestationof personal dislocation as a result of the decision to become anartist/intellectual is not limited to blacks, for many working-class white intellectualshave also experienced similar degrees of dislocation/alienation ontheir journey to bourgeois intellectualism?
Jones's decision to enter the world of ideas seems not to have been definitive,although we can now see that the young LeRoi constantly risked adversityto begin his intellectual journey. Not only did he have doubts about theutility and validity of the intellectual and artistic life, but he also could notnecessarily rely on encouragement and understanding from those closest tohim. For Jones and numerous other blacks, the decision to become an intellectualwas a very lonely one. Like many black intellectuals, Jones began hisintellectual journey burdened with guilt for betraying the crude economicmobility expectations of those who supported him and for "selfishly" participatingin a bourgeois pursuit that seemed unrelated to improving the lives ofthose to whom he felt an attachment.
Baraka is acutely aware of those factors that led to his initial immersionin the life of the mind.
Coming out of Howard and getting trapped in the Air Force had pulled me away from the "good job" path." ... the service was my graduate school or maybe it was undergraduate school ... it was the pain and frustration of this enforced isolation that began to make me scrawl my suffering to seek some audience for my elusive self-pity.... Because now, so completely cut off, I read constantly, almost every waking hour.... The best-seller list became a kind of bible for me. I tried to read everything on it.... I wanted to become an intellectual.
During this period, the moment of his intellectual birth, Jones often reflectedon how he had misused his time at Howard. Whatever anxieties he experiencedconcerning his wasted Howard years was overshadowed by his reliefat having avoided the crude "upward-mobility" trajectory. This realizationwas brought home to him on those occasions when he encounteredgraduates of Howard who were pursuing careers in the air force. Their careerism,which masked a weltanschauung hostile to a creative engagementwith ideas, reinforced in Jones's mind the belief that he was, after all, on theright path. Although military life provided him with relief from the resilientpressures of "being a credit to his race," the military could not sustain his desireto be a credit to himself intellectually. For that, Jones would have to lookelsewhere.
ENTERING BOHEMIA: NURTURING THE
INTELLECTUAL QUEST
In 1957 Jones left the military after being given an "undesirable discharge" onthe erroneous grounds that he had been a communist. He was accused of havingbelonged to a communist front organization during his days at Howardand later hiding this information from the military when he enlisted. A latter-dayvictim of the residual phobias of the McCarthy period, Jones wasthrilled to leave the "error farce." Paradoxically, his escape from the militarycoincided with an event that foreshadowed an intensifying dependence ofblacks on the federal government for protection of their citizenship status.During the same year as his discharge, President Dwight Eisenhower reluctantlyordered federal troops into Little Rock, Arkansas, to guarantee thesafety of nine black children who were integrating the formerly all-white CentralHigh School. Eisenhower had decided in this instance to place the federalgovernment behind the implementation of the Brown decision because a stateofficial, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus, openly challenged the authority ofthe federal government to issue and implement the ruling. Under the nationalspotlight, Central High School was integrated with the help of a federalizedArkansas National Guard and the 101st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army.
One can only wonder how the Little Rock crisis affected Jones's spirit.Although all black Americans lived daily with the hypocrisy of America's contradictorycommitments to democracy and white supremacy, the impact ofthis incongruity on a black person's psyche varied with the individual. Whatdid it mean for Jones to be part of the Strategic Air Command, an organizationwhose mission was to protect a country (and to destroy the world, if needbe), even though that country did not protect and value his existence? DidEisenhower's actions give him a ray of hope, or did the necessity for the federaltroops' intervention appear to doom the long-run prospects of a multiracialnation?
Upon his discharge from the air force, Jones moved to Greenwich Village.Just a short distance from his home town of Newark, the Village was nonethelessan abrupt departure from his past and expected future. Jones's parentshelped him move into his first New York City apartment. In his autobiography,he recalls the dissonance and disappointment in his mother's face whenshe first saw his dark, empty, cold-water flat. This was not what she had envisionedfor her son, the "child prodigy."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from AMIRI BARAKA by JERRY GAFIO WATTS. Copyright © 2001 by New York University. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Table of Contents
| Acknowledgments | vii |
| Preface | x |
| Introduction | 1 |
| 1 Birth of an Intellectual Journey | 21 |
| 2 Bohemian Immersions | 44 |
| 3 An Alien among Outsiders | 85 |
| 4 Rejecting Bohemia: The Politicization of Ethnic Guilt | 141 |
| 5 The Quest for a Blacker Art | 171 |
| 6 Toward a Black Arts Infrastructure | 210 |
| 7 Black Arts Poet and Essayist | 225 |
| 8 Black Revolutionary Playwright | 259 |
| 9 Kawaida: Totalizing the Commitment | 291 |
| 10 The Slave as Master: Black Nationalism, Kawaida, and the | |
| Repression of Women | 325 |
| 11 New-Ark and the Emergence of Pragmatic Nationalism | 348 |
| 12 Pan-Africanism | 374 |
| 13 National Black Political Convention | 401 |
| 14 Ever Faithful: Toward a Religious Marxism | 420 |
| 15 The Artist as Marxist / The Marxist asArtist | 444 |
| Conclusion | 464 |
| Notes | 481 |
| Bibliography | 553 |
| Index | 571 |
| About the Author | 577 |
What People are Saying About This
"Jerry Watts's examination of the career of Amiri Baraka is engaged, scholarly, tough-minded, informative, and, for many, infuriating and exasperating, as it should be. With this work, Watts takes his place among a small group of important scholars that are mapping, in its rich complexity, African American intellectual history and the place of the black public intellectual in the modern world."
-Gerald Early,Washington University in St. Louis
"Spell-binding. Watts's study is the most comprehensive extant assessment and critique of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka's literary and political career. More than a biography of Baraka, this book uses his career as a litmus test for raising the important questions about African-American intellectual life in the twentieth century. Extremely well-written, provocative, and engaging."
-Werner Sollors,Harvard University
"Brilliant and provocative, Watts offers a trenchant critique of Baraka through his nuanced reading of the relationship of black intellectuals to African American communities and American liberalism. Transcending many recent critiques of black essentialism and authenticity through an exceptionally grounded and lucid contextualization of Baraka's protean political persona, this book is essential reading for scholars of black America and modern liberalism."
-Kevin Gaines,University of Michigan
"A serious and sustained engagement with Baraka's artistic and activist endeavors. Even at its most critical it demonstrates a rare level of rigor and commitment to the work of a major black thinker. This is an important book about one of our most important intellectuals."
-Farah Jasmine Griffin,author of If You Can't Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday
"Watts attempts to do for Baraka what Baraka did for (or to) other black intellectuals—that is, redefine his role as a black intellectual. Watts's critical, intellectual archaeology reveals the complicated motivations behind Baraka's rhetorical Molotov cocktails, his zest for the diatribe, and his outsider-insider balancing act. Those interested in the evolution of post-civil rights black intellectual-activist discourse had better prepare to wrestle with this big and opinionated book."
-Jonathan Scott Holloway,Yale University