Brick City Vanguard: Amiri Baraka, Black Music, Black Modernity by James Smethurst

Abstract

Reviewed by: Brick City Vanguard: Amiri Baraka, Black Music, Black Modernity by James Smethurst Matthew Calihman James Smethurst.Brick City Vanguard: Amiri Baraka, Black Music, Black Modernity. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2020. 227 pp. $26.95. Amiri Baraka’s development as an artist and thinker has raised vexing questions about race, nation, and class as forms of social identification and mobilization. In 1965, Baraka left the racially and ethnically mixed bohemian arts milieu of lower Manhattan for a life in Black nationalist cultural and political work. He decamped to Harlem, and within the same year, he returned to his hometown of Newark, New Jersey. A decade later, in the mid-1970s, he renounced Black nationalism for a Marxist politics that envisioned leading roles for African Americans and other peoples who had been subject to colonial domination and exploitation. For some observers, these changes were ruptures. But in Being & Race: Black Writing since 1970 (1988), Charles Johnson argued that Baraka’s development was a single continuous struggle: “There is from the very beginning a tension in his thought [End Page 97] between modern leftist intellectualism and race politics, between international Marxism and black nationalism” (24). Although many critics have shown that Baraka engaged with Black nationalism in even his earliest writing, few have recognized how far back his engagement with Marxism went. As William J. Maxwell notes in F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature (2015), the subject who first emerges in Baraka’s FBI file, opened in 1957, was at least “curious” about Marxist politics (117). But the crucial study here is James Smethurst’s The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (2005), which transformed scholarship on Black Arts by surveying the movement’s various regional manifestations and by tracing its origins to midcentury intersections of Black nationalism, bohemianism, and Old Left working-class radicalism. The Black Arts Movement established Baraka’s personal and institutional connections to a Popular Front movement that survived up to his time. In Brick City Vanguard: Amiri Baraka, Black Music, Black Modernity, Smethurst resumes his exploration of Baraka’s relationship to Marxism. The book focuses on the philosophy of history that Baraka began to devise early in his career and fully formulated during the four decades preceding his death in 2014, a period that critics have generally neglected. Smethurst considers Baraka’s historical materialist vision of the development of an African American culture, a Black nation, and a Black working class, the last of which, Baraka proposed, would play a vanguard role in an international communist movement. And in Brick City Vanguard as in The Black Arts Movement, place matters: It was in Newark, Smethurst argues, that Baraka learned to hear Black music as a kind of vernacular historiography of culture, nation, and class. Baraka’s Newark was a place where many thousands of Southern Black migrants, including his own parents, entered industrial modernity. Challenging most earlier accounts of Baraka’s family history (including many of Baraka’s own accounts), Smethurst writes that Baraka’s parents entered this world as working-class strivers and maintained a basically proletarian outlook even after they found their way to middle-class jobs. In workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods, among other social contexts, the Joneses and other Black Newarkers encountered European immigrant groups (most notably, Jews and Italians) in relationships that were determined by Northern Jim Crow but that involved cultural exchange. However, because the Great Migration continued through most of the twentieth century, the Black Newark culture in which Baraka grew up and to which he returned as an adult maintained a vital connection to its Southern Black roots; for example, the city’s Black musicians and audiences remained in touch with Southern blues styles.In some ways, the Newark in which this book places Baraka looks like the Northern metropolises in Richard Wright’s Marxist “folk history” of Black America, 12 Million Black Voices (1941). But whereas Wright’s narrative ends with a prophecy of Black people thronging hopefully into new interracial industrial labor unions, Baraka’s Newark story, as Smethurst recounts it, confronts a modern city in which racial caste persists and where the industrial...