Brick City Vanguard: Amiri Baraka, Black Music, Black Modernity

by James Smethurst

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781625345158
Publisher:	University of Massachusetts Press
Publication date:	05/29/2020
Series:	African American Intellectual History
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments   ix

INTRODUCTION
Brick City Vanguard   1

CHAPTER ONE
“That’s Where Sarah Vaughan Lives”
Amiri Baraka, Newark, and the Landscape and Soundscape of Black Modernity   17

CHAPTER TWO
“Formal Renditions”
Revisiting the Baraka-Ellison Debate   59

CHAPTER THREE
“A Marching Song for Some Strange Uncharted Country” The Black Future and Amiri Baraka’s Liner Notes   91

CHAPTER FOUR
“Soul and Madness”
Baraka’s Recorded Music and Poetry from Bohemia to Black Arts   117

CHAPTER FIVE
“I See Him Sometimes”
William Parker Reimagines and Amiri Baraka Glosses Curtis Mayfield   159

CONCLUSION
Blues People at Symphony Hall   197

Notes   203

Index   221

What People are Saying About This

William J. Harris

James Smethurst has read everything on Baraka and produced an original and important book. Brick City Vanguard is a major contribution to the field.

Jean-Philippe Marcoux

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.

Editorial 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

"An illuminating work about a central figure in the Black Arts Movement."—CHOICE

"[A] generous and generative work that positions Baraka as a listener and singer/vocalizer as well as a reader and writer. Smethurst invites us to think about Baraka's intellectual production with and about music as a sustained engagement with Marxist thought . . . Brick City Vanguard gestures toward exciting articulations of Black studies and cultural studies."—American Literary History

"Brick City Vanguard equips readers to take seriously, at long last, the entire career of a major writer-activist, one whose abiding concerns remain before us today."—African American Review

"Through a critical reassessment of the way Amiri Baraka came to understand and perform Black art while reflecting the diversity of its social and political thought, Smethurst offers a novel approach to reinterpreting Baraka’s cultural legacy."—Journal of African American History

From the Publisher