A new aesthetics of black equality: on Tony Medina

Abstract

In the US today, a new generation of poets and writers of colour is taking up and moving on from the 1960s Black Arts Movement. According to Amiri Baraka, a co-founder of that movement, one of its pitfalls was an inadequate critique of ‘race’ at the expense of a class understanding of oppression. Subsequent critical discussion has done little to correct this, despite the crucial links between class and race made by Malcolm X shortly before his death. But the paths indicated by Malcolm are now being challengingly developed by one of the most exciting of this new generation of poets, the Afro-Puerto Rican writer Tony Medina. Combining a visceral political sensibility with a dynamic, improvisatory aesthetic, Medina’s work speaks with urgency of the realities of life in the ghetto and the barrio and the need for radical, activist struggle.