It’s Nation Time: The Demonic Poethic of Amiri Baraka’s New Ark

Year 2019, Issue: 51, 73 - 96, 01.11.2019

Kate Siklosi

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

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