It’s Nation Time: The Demonic Poethic of Amiri Baraka’s New Ark
Abstract
This article examines the work of Amiri Baraka during
the 1960s and 70s using a fused geographic and poetic lens that is
inflected by Katherine McKittrick’s (via Sylvia Wynter) concept of
“demonic ground.” In works such as It’s Nation Time (1970) and In
Our Terribleness (1970), Baraka articulates an imagined, communal,
demonic black urban nation and mirrors this vision back to his
community so they may uprise from the deliberate invisibility and
geographic dispossession at the hands of the white establishment.
Through its imperative balance of poetic action with transformative
activism beyond the page in post-rebellion New Ark, Baraka’s
demonic poethic demonstrates how space is inherently alterable, and
how uneven geographies may be contested and transformed in art and
in social practice.
Keywords
Amiri Baraka, poetry, poetics, geography, postwar, social transformation
References
- Alighieri, Dante. Monarchy and Three Political Letters. Translated by Donald Nicholl and Colin Hardie, London, Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1954.
- Baraka, Amiri. AFRIKAN REVOLUTION. Jihad Press, 1973.
- ---. Black Magic Poetry 1961-1967. New York, The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1969.
- ---. In Our Terribleness: Some Elements and Meaning in Black Style. The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1970.
- ---. It’s Nation Time. Third World Press, 1970.
- ---. Raise, Race, Rays, Raze: Essays Since 1965. Random House, 1971.
- ---. Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones. Morrow, 1979.
- ---. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones. Freundlich Books, 1984.
- Cotkin, George. Feast of Excess: A Cultural History of the New Sensibility. Oxford UP, 2015.
- Crawford, Margo Natalie. “Black Light on the Wall of Respect: The Chicago Black Arts Movement.” New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement, edited by Lisa Gail Collins and Margo Natalie Crawford, Rutgers UP, 2006, pp. 23-42.